It’s no secret that it’s tough doing a startup. Small businesses need all the help they can get. We’ve compiled some of the best apps that can assist…
As always, there’s always an app for that.
When it comes to running your small business or startup there are dozens of useful apps that can help. Startup News has compiled a list of some of the best to help you take charge, simplify finance, increase productivity and more.
Finance and accounting
This was a tough one. There are many amazing finance and accounting apps that’ll help you with payroll, taxes, income and expenses. Xero being the most common in Australia. MYOB also.
Gusto, simplifies payroll, taxes, reports new hires to the government and handles all your tax filling needs and it even emails employees’ payslips.
QuickBooks is an accounting software that helps run a company’s overall finances; recording income and expense, financial statements, profit and losses, employee and vendor payments and more.
Wave is an easy to use accounting software that was specifically created for small business; tracking profit and loss, managing invoicing and payments to customers and employees and generates accounting reports. Best of all, it’s free, so a good place to start. (Startup News uses Wave). Wave even added a free personal financing software to help business owners manage all their finances in one app.
Task management
Trello is an app that can help a team manage multiple projects in an easy to navigate platform. It allows you to create, assign and organise projects as movable cards. Great for smaller teams who like to visually display their projects.
Basecamp helps organise your teams work flow by compiling the information into projects. The app allows teams to discuss the project process in a chatroom, upload files, create to-do lists and calendar mark important dates. Basecamp even has a snooze option as a feature that allows you to take a three-hour time out from work, in addition to importing your work hours through its work can wait feature.
Zenkit offers a Kanban board, mind mapping tools, to-do list and a calendar. It’ll help you project manage, schedule, allocate resource and budget.
Carrot: A fun motivational task management tool. You keep Carrot happy by completing task and it’ll reward you for it. Don’t do your task and you’ll upset it. This gamification feature can make it a fun way to get things done.
Team communication
Tipi vs Slack: Slack is the most commonly used team communication app, whilst Tipi is new to the scene. Slack allows staff to communicate with each other, share files, link and more. By contrast, Tipi encourages asynchronous communications. Employees do not need to respond to messages in real-time.
Slack’s been copping a bad rap for encouraging employees to become slackers sharing the usual personal meme and message. Tipi solves this problem, however, if you need your employee’s attention ASAP then Slack may be the way to go. If your information doesn’t need immediate attention, then Tipi is great.
WA-based Teamline (formerly BusyBot) is a bolt on into Slack, that makes organising things (like office parties, and other stuff) easy as.
Join.Me is a lot like Skype, as it’s a cloud based video conferring app. Join.Me makes online meeting, collaborations, presentations as easy as a push of a button. Unlike Skype it doesn’t require users to download a software or even sign up for an account. It allows users to simultaneously share screens and has advance audio features that can be controlled by the meeting host and offers presenter swaps so that everyone can tag-team present with full control.
Email organisation
Astro Mail: I think it’s safe to assume our Inbox is too often flooded with useless mail; Astro Mail is a smart email software which learns which emails are important and which aren’t. The app even has a snooze, open tracking and send later feature.
Time saving tools
Pocket: If you have an overload of content coming your way that you can’t quite get to, pocket helps you save them for later. This includes news, videos and images.
TripIt: is for the travelling business person (or anyone really) but, if you need all your travel plans organised into one itinerary that you can access though an app, TripIt makes it easy for you. In addition to collecting and storing all your travel plans and organising them, the app includes location based travel tips.
Evernote: is a great app to save and upload personalised notes, images, audio, scanned documents, receipts and more. Neatly packed for you to organise and share as you wish. Free! (Startup News uses Evernote.)
Proven: helps with HR related tasks. It helps you post job listings, receive responses and provides a platform to look through and organise applicants with one click of a button.
Canva: is a fast, easy design solution that can save money and time. You can design from scratch but, you also have the option to choose from thousands of pre designed templates and layouts for everything including resumes, posters, info graphs and much more. Started out in WA, is now based in Sydney with a valuation north of US$1Billion. (Startup News uses Canva.)
Hootsuite: allows business to schedule posts for numerous social media accounts. Allowing you to monitor all your social media account status and measure the impact of your posts. (Startup News uses Hootsuite.)
This is by no means all of it but these are some of the best and most useful apps to help organise business, manage teams, emails, finances and more. If you know of other and better apps, do please post them in the comments section below…
Enjoy!
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