Managing your business needs is never an easy task. As more and more of our work life is shifting to the online world, keeping up with the competition means having the best digital presence and workflow possible.
The best business apps make it easier to manage various aspects of your business, keep your operations running agile and efficiently, and bring your team members together to work cooperatively from the office, at home, and on the go.
Today we are looking at 4 apps that every SME business needs to stay on top of the digital transformation and truly excel in 2021.
Accounting: Freshbooks
Staying on top of your business expenses has never been easier. Freshbooks is a popular cloud-based accounting software that is 100% built of business owners. From balancing your books to managing client relationships, Freshbooks provides up-to-date information on all your business expenses.
Create personalised invoices, set up time tracking and automatic billing, and prepare business reports from any and all devices. Freshbooks also allows you to accept credit card payments via your mobile device for on-the-spot transactions.
Freshbooks comes with native integration for a wide range of other popular apps, including PayPal, MailChimp, Basecamp, WordPress, Gusto, Zendesk and more. This keeps management hassles to a minimum and lets you focus on running your business.
Price: Starting from $6 / month
Alternative: Quickbooks
Customer Relationship Management: Hubspot
Hubspot is an online platform that provides client management, digital marketing and sales support tools all in one web-based software solution. Going way beyond setting up websites and inbound funnels, Hubspot offers a comprehensive toolkit to improve your online presence and better manage your client base.
Hubspot gives you the tools to build long-lasting relationships with your prospective and existing clients, while providing your teams with meaningful data and insights into the customer journey.
As a complete system, Hubspot gives businesses the best opportunity for long-term growth in the digital world, and it’s combination of marketing, sales and account management tools is perfect for any business looking to step up their client success management.
Price: Free trials available, or from $35 / month for basic features
Alternative: Salesforce
Project Management: Trello
Stay on top of your project management from wherever you are in the world with Trello – the easy way to organise your business and keep your teams productive.
As a project collaboration tool, Trello enables you to organize and prioritize projects in a visual and flexible manner. With a robust feature set and automation, Trello is a quick and easy solution for teams of all sizes.
You can bring even more functionality to your projects through Trello powerups – allowing you to integrate and connect with other apps to add in features like calendars, custom fields and card repeaters.
Price: Free for individuals, $10 / month for businesses
Alternative: Monday
Customizable Design: Canva
Canva is an online design and publishing tool that makes it easy to put together amazing digital creative. A vast array of templates and simple design tools make it possible for anyone to create pixel perfect posters, social media posts, custom graphics and even whole websites!
Canva also releases a whole suite of training and development courses aimed at expanding your design knowledge, with heaps of tutorials and blog articles on the finer details of design, branding and marketing.
Price: Free for individual use, or $165 / year to unlock all features and templates
Alternative: Adobe Spark
Integrated Workspace: Google Workspace
Need to keep all your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in one, central location? Google Workspace brings together all your standard office software in a straight-forward, cloud-based solution.
With a streamlined user interface and easy-to-use toolkit, Google Workspace is perfect for remote teams and regular office work stations. Real-time editing allows for multiple people to work on the same project collaboratively, and cloud storage means no more lost documents.
Even better, Google Workspace allows users to access their documents from any device: including PC’s, laptops and mobile devices, so you’ll always have access to your documents.
Conclusion
There’s our 5 top picks for apps every business must get. What’s your favourite app right now? Let us know what apps your business is using to get ahead in the comments below or over on facebook.com/upgradetorise.
