You’ve been vowing to yourself for years now to stop running your business on 15 different spreadsheets, and make it a little easier on yourself. Why not finally do yourself a favor and go through with it in 2016? There are some marvelous tools available now to small businesses that can be purchased for a reasonable amount, and you’ll probably offset that cost with efficiency gains in the first couple months of usage. Here are some that are worthy of consideration.
HR Management – Zenefits
All HR needs can be managed with this single, free-of-charge cloud software suite, which automates literally everything in HR – employee benefits, workmen’s compensation, compliance, payroll, insurance plans, COBRA, and even retirement plans.
Project Management – Wrike
Wrike software combines traditional project management features with a project space where all team members can collaborate in real time for maximum productivity and information-sharing. Wrike makes it easy to keep track of project milestones and deadlines, and avoids overlap by team members because of the greater visibility it provides.
Cloud Accounting – Wave
Wave isn’t a single application, it’s actually a suite of applications for small businesses that manage invoicing, accounting, payments, and payroll. Manual accounting is a thing of the past with Wave, once you connect it to your bank account and other data sources.
Social Media Management – Hootsuite
Hootsuite has been around for awhile, but it’s still a great product for managing your social media posts and other activity. From the same dashboard, you can schedule posts and messages, interact with followers, and calculate your social media ROI. Built-in analytics reports make it obvious what needs tweaking, and what is working well.
Billable Hours Tracking – Toggl
This product is well-suited to tracking project teams, so you can tell at a quick glance just how well that latest project is going, and it has handshake compatibility with other popular productivity applications like Trello and Asana. No one really cares for the tedium of manually tracking billable hours, and with Toggl you can single-click your way to rapid-fire data entry, and then roll data up into groupings by projects and tags, and see all the results in a handy dashboard.