12 Great Small Business Tools Every Entrepreneur Needs To Get Familiar With

Being a small business owner nowadays involves having a lot of skills. As your team is small in the beginning you will need to incorporate many functions – you will most likely act as the Project Manager, Human Resource Manager, Customer Service Expert, ect.

OK, that may sound a little bit scary, but what if we told you, this could be lot easier if you get familiar with some helpful web tools designed for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Project Management

Basecamp

Basecamp is one of the most popular web tools for project management out there. It really makes working on a project way easier as all activities are incorporated in the software. All users have access to a custom dashboard with information about the project activities. With Basecamp you can assign tasks to the employees, open discussions with them, set milestones and manage all communications with external vendors and partners. You can either use the free version or go for a paid account that starts from 20$/m.

Team Collaboration

Slack

Even in a small team, smooth team collaboration is a must, if you want to have an effective workflow. It’s a total mess when some of the team members communicate via email, some use Skype and others come to your desk when they have to tell you something.

That’s why Slack is a great small business tool and makes team collaboration much easier. You can divide your company’s Slack instance into different channels with different topics. You can also share files and move them between Slack and a cloud service.

Keeping files organized

Dropbox

Sharing files among team members could be really difficult. Using a cloud service is the easiest way when different team members need to access the same files. Sharing those files via email or some team collaboration tool is not very effective. If the data you need to share is not so big, you can also enjoy the free Dropbox account that comes with 5Gb space.

Building a website

OXXY

We do not like to brag without reason about Oxxy Website Builder, but we thought our platform is definitely worth mentioning in our list of small business tools and resources. No matter what business you start, you will most definitely need a website.

Choosing a website builder might be the best solution – it’s cost-effective, you can do it on your own or even if a professional web designer do it for you, you can later on easily make changes. To learn more about what we offer, visit our Help & Support Center or just try out our free package.

Invoicing

Slimvoice

Invoicing gets much easier with a tool like Slimvoice. It not only generates extremely simple invoices, but also let you easily keep track of which invoices are paid and which are not. This great web tool sends the invoices directly to your clients when generated so you do not need to store files on your computer or even download them. The best part – it’s free.

Email Marketing

MailChimp

Email marketing is a must for every startup. One of the most popular and easiest to utilize tools out there is MailChimp. The software is perfect for small businesses with small subscriber lists. The free plan lets you send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers. You can also upgrade at any moment, if you see that those 12,000 emails are not enough.

Social Media Management

Hootsuite

The popularity of social media marketing (SEM) has been growing among small busineses in the recent years. All types of companies, no matter if B2B or B2C, utilize social media in their marketing efforts. There are a lot of small business tools to use and Hootsuite is one of the best choices. It not only let you plan and schedule the content you share in social media, but also to prepare custom reports about your company profiles.

Human Resource Management

TribeHR

TribeHR is a software that help small businesses deal with the hard task to keep up with all HR related work. In a single app you get almost all functions you need: tracking of vacations, notes on employees, job postings, tracking of employees’ development, etc. If you are a small business owners, you can get a package for up to 15 employees for as much as $19 per month.

Keeping track of ideas

Evernote

Great ideas come up even on the most unexpected times, so you need a tool that lets you easily keep track of them. Evernote is a great tool for the purpose. It lets you write down and organize your thoughts, keep articles from the web, photos and much more. Evernote comes with a free version with most basic features, a premium package of as much as $5 per month and a business plan that costs $10 per month per user. The business plan is great if you want to use Evernote for collaborating with your team members.

Legals

Docracy

Docracy is a useful selection of all legal documents you need. The site provides free documents for the most common situations and it’s free. This is very useful for startups as hiring a lawyer is really expensive. So you can use Docracy unless the situation is a lot complicated. Experts say that in the legal world Docracy is what GitHub is for developers. Both platforms are driven by the strong communities behind them.

Keeping track of data and statistics

Google Analytics

We have talked about Google Analytics in our article about the best SEO tools available, but we taught that it is worth mentioning it one more time. Google Analytics can be a lot useful to small business owners, especially those who depend on their website. The powerful statistics that the tool provides can tell you a lot about your visitors – how they find you, what they do when they find you, do they find you interesting and much more.

Customer Support

Zopim

Every company that thrives for success tries to do its best to respond to the problems of the customers in the fastest and most convenient way. Zopim is a chat in real time that you can integrate to your platform or website and then communicate with your customers via the web application. If you are the only one to handle chat requests (or one of your team members), you can go for the free version. For bigger teams there the Basic package and the Advanced Package that come for $11.2 per month and $20 per month.

Feel free to share all small business tools and resources you use!