Start Up The Smart Way

When you're heavily involved in the daily pull of your business, it's hard to find the breathing space to stop and analyze how your day-to-day workload is shaping up. It might be that you're just about getting through the load and fall into bed exhausted, with your brain ticking over about tomorrow's tasks. Or maybe you're one of a growing number of business owners who, no matter what industry they're in, have employed some smart tech to take care of the basics, leaving them free to concentrate on the big stuff.

You might be an artist, a freelance web developer or just graduated from Baylor DNP-NNP, whatever your profession and whatever your business, there's some smart business tech out there that we guarantee is going to be a gamechanger in your working life.

In this blog, we take a look at small business tech offerings that have the fore this year and what they can to help level-up your small business.

QuickBooks

This app seems to have elbowed its way to the forefront of finance and accounting solutions for small business. The app quickly and smoothly links to all your accounts, so your business accounts will work in tandem with your personal account, your PayPal account and so on. You can use it to track how your business is performing month to month, keep up to date with your taxes, use it to pay and send out invoices and pay your staff payroll.

While there are other finance apps out there, QuickBooks is relatively easy to master and once you're up and running, having all your accounts in one place is going to make your working life all the easier.

Skype

Now we know that Skype isn't a new player to the game but though plenty of young contenders have tried to emulate it, quite simply Skype is still the major player when it comes to video conferencing. 

Besides the face-to-face offering, you can also use its voice chat and messaging functions. And Skype has made a conscientious effort to move with the times with its ability to be used on Amazon's Alexa as well. Free, incredibly straightforward, it's a deal-breaker.

RescueTime

If you think you just spent five minutes on Twitter, a couple of minutes checking your Insta account and just a moment or two on Facebook then you might be in for a shock. This handy app will track how long you spent on all the websites you visit and the apps you hop onto throughout your day.

Besides keeping tabs on your social media use, it's also incredibly useful for analyzing which areas of your business are demanding most of your time and what you might be able to do to change that up. If, for example, you're spending more time analyzing your data than creating marketing opportunities, you may need to consider how to make your day-to-day task list a more profitable one.

Just be prepared to be surprised at how those one or two minutes stack up throughout the day, which is why this app can also be set to trigger an alarm when you've spent too long on a certain app or page and can block certain, distracting websites we could mention.

Image from Pixabay CC0 Licence

Tripit

When you're at the start of your entrepreneurship journey, very often you're spending a lot of time on the road, pitching to potential customers, tracking down investment into your business and chasing up leads. This might be purely domestic or you may find yourself hopping on flights here and there to take your offer to a wider customer base.

If you are on the road quite a lot and your travel plans are hastily scribbled entries into your work diary you need Tripit in your life. Traveling and remembering everything takes up enough of your brainpower so delegate your arrangements to the app and take a mental load off. 

This app works by consolidating all your tickets into one master itinerary, no matter where you bought them online. You can then forward your plans on to your office or home, check flight delays, check-in, store e-tickets and so on. Just make sure to pack your phone charger!

Square

If you're a business that operates out of a store and has a physical payment space, then let us introduce Square to you. Your small but perfectly formed card reader attaches to a phone line or your mobile for fast, easy payments. It's compatible with apps downloadable from either Apple or Android, making it safe, portable and convenient.

Trello

If there's more than two of you in your new team, you need Trello. This app is not only going to get you organized, it's going to save a lot of arguments around the office over who missed that important client meeting or failed to complete a task.

Trello works by allowing you to create a project board. On that online board, you'll be able to pin cards which represent tasks that you can assign to team members. These boards can be adjusted, have comments and dates added to them for better clarity and each time a card is altered all the team members are sent an alert.

Ticking off completed cards means your tasks are on track and everyone knows what's expected of them. More importantly, no one is overlapping and there is a clear structure to any ongoing projects.

Dropbox

A perennial favorite and for good reason. Dropbox is quite simply the favorite when it comes to file storage and file sharing. The beauty of this app is how easy it is to use. Log in, find all your files and send or share as needed. Having the peace of mind that all your files are backed up is worth its weight in gold.

And it's not a lot of gold at that, in fact, if you're not storing away too much you might even get away with the free version – the perfect solution for lone freelancers. On the other hand, if you're in a larger start-up then you'll probably want to sign up to a monthly subscription. You'll also want to check out the latest feature, Paper, which allows collaborative working on documents.

Expensify

Sounds like a Hogwarts' spell but is, in fact, a smart app to help you keep track of your expenses. Particularly useful if you are out of the office quite a lot and need to keep tabs on food and fuel expenses for either you or the members of your team.

You can either link your own credit card to the app or take photos of receipts to upload. Turn all this information into a weekly or monthly expense report in minutes to send to your finance team.

Proven

We like Proven for the main reason that it is just a very good idea and has found a niche and filled it very well. When you're up to your neck in the day-to-day running of your business then something like Proven will help you to keep tabs on your hiring and job listings. It will let you post jobs to as many job boards as you need and help you to sift through responses, placing them in yes, no or maybe folders.

Following that, you'll be able to select the follow-up response you want to send to your applicant. This app is for perfect for businesses that need to hire on a regular basis, perhaps for catering jobs or as leaflet delivery agents.

When you're just starting off as the owner of a small business or as an entrepreneur you want to squeeze as much as you can out of every day. There is simply so much to do, so much to think about and so much to organize and it's down to you to make it all happen. The pressure is on and finding affordable, practical solutions for daily tasks that distract and frustrate you is a real focus.

Sure, you might need to spend a day getting to grips with something like QuickBooks but knowing how much time and effort it will save you, in the long run, is a day of your time well worth investing.

Getting organized with Dropbox or an app like Trello might seem like overkill when you have a small team but when every decision needs to lead something bigger and better making sure there's no overlap and clear task management is going to get you to where you want to be so much quicker.

What these apps can't do is tell you how to run your business, how to target your customers and bring in sales. What they can do is help you better organize your time so you can spend less time on paperwork and the admin that takes place behind the scenes and more time doing just those things that drive you and your business forward.

Get started with some smart tech today and see where a little business technology can help take your small startup and transform it into a business that's worth talking about.

 

Tech enthusiast, Android user and founder of the first HTC blog – Nick Gray has been blogging about HTC phones before most people knew what a smartphone even was. Over the years Nick has owned and tested dozens HTC devices and is constantly flashing new ROMs to his Android phones.

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