Ask any successful small business owner or operator and many of them will say a key to their success is being more productive and efficient than everyone else. Businesses that are more agile and able to get more from their resources is more vital than ever in our highly competitive small business environment of today. With this in mind here are 6 web based apps that any small business should consider if they’re looking to increase their productivity and win in their market.
WIZEHIVE
If you haven’t heard of Wizehive it’s an online collaboration platform that allows teams to share tasks, files, calendars, notes and more – essentially it takes all the ways your team and employee interacts and creates one, unified locations for all that activity to occur. Wizehive can capture information in a variety of ways outside of manual entry like email, twitter and via your phone. Beyond that, Wizehive has workflow tools so that your processes can be controlled and more efficient. Wizehive is actually having a new beta of their version 3.0 product which you can check out here.
POWER BI
This business data analysis and data visualisation suite from Microsoft is one of two programs in the business sphere that are WAY ahead of the competition. If your business produces lots of data, be that on sales, marketing, personnel or whatever else, plug it into this program via one of the many different data integrations it has, and you’ll be presented with your data in a visual format, and from that you can see areas of improvement.
OUTRIGHT
Outright is nice little accounting app that lets you get a picture of your finances quickly. As a small business the last thing you want to do is spend tons of time monitoring your accounting side of things, when you could be focusing it on growing your business and Outright is great tool for that. Outright allows you to easily see info on income, expenses, taxes, and other reports. It’s view allows you to see total income and expense broken down by category, customer and vendor.
WORKFLOWY
It’s not very often that Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, says that he something as much as Gmail and Google Calendar but WorkFlowy is that application. WorkFlowy is essentially notetaking on steroids and its founders refer to it as “A single piece of paper that holds your brain”… a pretty impressive claim. Now the value of WorkFlowy is because of its ability to break things down into chunks or groups. If your business depends on a lot of creativity this is basically a way to record your brainstorming!
LEARNABLE
Want to make a new website but can’t afford to pay a designer? Learnable is a great resource for learning all you need to make great websites like PHP, HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and more. For $17 per month you get access to all their online book and courses that can pretty much teach you anything you need to know and a much cheaper price than hiring a designer.
HARVEST
Harvest is time tracking made easy – it lets you track time and send invoices all from one interface. Harvest stands out because of its ease and simplicity while having powerful features like mobile access, tons of awesome pre built reports and api integration with Quickbooks, Basecamp, Twitter and tons of other applications you use every day.