8 Apps to Streamline Your Workflow
Starting a business is hard, but luckily for you, we’ve made our own mistakes along the way so that you don’t have to. Launching and operating a business involves such a steep learning curve, but in today’s techie world, there are apps to make the whole process easier! Read on to learn about some of our favorite apps that helped streamline our workflow.
Quickbooks
Bookkeeping is one of our least favorite parts of the job, but so necessary. By linking an online Quickbooks account to your business bank account, bookkeeping updates are automatically loaded into your personal Quickbooks portal. Categorizing and approving each revenue and expense item may take a little Googling, but you will have perfectly balanced books for your year-end reporting. Quickbooks makes the archaic bookkeeping process easy, quick, and completely approachable for small business owners.
Gusto
Payroll is another tedious and expensive process, but Gusto makes it easy. This app lets you pay employees and contractors, and handles almost all of the compliance and paperwork on your behalf. Before starting a business, few people know how regulated and specific the payroll process can be. For a small fraction of the cost of old-school payroll companies, Gusto gives you control, flexibility and protection from most traps that first time entrepreneurs fall into.
Slack
Slack allows your team to collaborate and complete tasks without the use of email. You can set up projects within the app and assign them to team members, and managers can track progress, give feedback and supervise their employees. The simple interface allows users to search, prioritize and update one another so that everyone knows what is on their plate and nothing slips through the cracks.
Dropbox
Forget stacks of external hard drives. With this unlimited cloud-based file keeper, you can access your files securely anywhere you go. Make more space for pictures or music on your phone. Create shared drives for team storage and choose their privacy, so that some can be exclusively for your marketing team and others for your CFO. Forget ever having to back up your hard drive again.
Expensify
Is there anything more tedious than expense reporting? Expensify makes it slightly less maddening by keeping track of all your expenses directly on your mobile device. With proprietary receipt capturing technology, Expensify generates automatic updates from credit cards and bank accounts, and then synchs across multiple devices so that you can focus on the important stuff – like your actual job.
Harvest
Harvest is perfect for small businesses or freelance employees who charge by the hour. With timers to help you track your billable hours, invoice generation and internal reporting, Harvest lets you see how well work is being distributed within an organization. Workers can access Harvest from any device, allowing them to track their work anywhere while maintaining consistent billing and invoices for clients.
Mailchimp
No experience necessary for email marketing in Mailchimp. This easy-to-use email marketing manager lets the user populate beautifully designed campaigns, track email lists and monitor campaign performance. By dragging and dropping images, you circumvent the need for engineers or designers. Built-in reports tell you what is important in email marketing analytics and let you focus on communication with your subscribers.
Hootsuite
The fastest growing form of marketing is social media, and with an increasing number of social channels it has become almost impossible to manage. Hootsuite centralizes all your social media accounts into one central portal. In addition to letting you post to multiple platforms from one location, Hootsuite gives you insightful analytics, notifications of user-interaction, and link-shortening tools that help you get your message out in fewer characters.