To a layman, business owners are fortunate people. They make good money, live an affluent life, walk around proudly with the title of a leader, entrepreneur, businessman, employer, merchant, etc. Wait. You need to dig deeper because business owners have a whole lot of stuff to manage and it’s far from easy.
You don’t taste success before sweating it out hard, do you?
Last few years have been quite challenging for businesses, especially SMBs with limited resources.
We don’t think that we need to discuss how Covid-19 changed the scene dramatically.
It’s more about doing smart work than hard work, and in this digital age, you need to have the best tool to manage various aspects of your business.
Why do you need these tools? Read on to find more about it.
Why Do You Need Business Management Tools?
As a business owner, you have to sync with the latest technology or else your business is likely to be trailing others.
Just consider different roles you perform simultaneously to keep the business running – hiring people, planning, allocating resources to tasks, track time and performance, keep all team members on the same page, ensure optimal productivity, manage daily operations, and the list goes on and on.
If you not using the right tools to manage your business, chances are:
- You are overwhelmed with daily grind that you have to do manually
- Your team is struggling to achieve efficiency due to lack of organization and planning
- Your team is not utilizing the work time properly
- Poor communication
- Low quality, low productivity, low employees’ morale
- Your business is struggling to achieve the desired revenue goals
- High employee turnover
How Business Management Tools Can Change Things Around
Latest business management tools are designed to empower both business owners and their teams to be more organized, productive, and efficient without compromising on the quality of work.
With all the right information related to tasks, projects, and people put in one place, businesses are in a better position to make well-informed decisions.
Business management tools help in-office and remote teams to seamlessly collaborate on tasks as every team member has a comprehensive view of who is supposed to work on what, with whom (group tasks), and deliver it by when (deadlines).
Some vital benefits that top-rated business management tools can provide are as follows:
- Seamless collaboration among team members
- Timely communication
- Streamlined work processes
- Boosts morale of employees
- Monitoring of tasks and people from a single place
- Improved planning, organization, and execution
- Minimizes resource wastage
- Improves job accountability
- Better organization of work
10 Business Management Tools That Are Too Good To Ignore
1. ProofHub (work management & team collaboration)
Managing various aspects of your business manually is not going to take your productivity and efficiency to the next level, that’s for sure.
ProofHub is a SaaS-based work management and team collaboration solution that can help businesses with improved planning, collaboration, organization, and delivery of projects through a suite of powerful features under one virtual roof.
Be it task management, chat, online proofing, file management, time tracking, and reporting, ProofHub enables your business to streamline work processes and achieve improved coordination on tasks.
Flat-rate pricing plans, ease of usage, and simple learning curve make ProofHub an ideal tool for businesses and teams of all sizes.
Pricing: The Ultimate Control plan is priced at $89 per month, when billed annually (unlimited users allowed).
2. Bamboo HR (business recruitment)
Bamboo HR is a human resource software that collects and organizes all the information pertaining to employee life cycle – hiring, evaluation, onboarding, and more.
With Bamboo HR, businesses do not need to spend a huge amount of time and effort to collect, study, and report on sensitive data using simple spreadsheets and paper files. This tool helps businesses with hiring, onboarding, preparing compensation, and building the company culture.
All your employee information is organized in a single, secure database with powerful reporting tools and editing functions.
Pricing: The Paid plan starts at $6 per employee, per month.
3. Basecamp (work organization tool)
Basecamp markets itself as an all-in-one toolkit for working remotely. It is a real-time collaboration and work organization tool that can help businesses and their employees organize all their work and coordinate on tasks without any hassle, from any location on the web, iOS, and Android.
You can set up boards for different teams and projects as you get a detailed view of where everything stands, understand what everyone’s working on, and how to make the next plan that everyone knows about.
Pricing: Basecamp offers a single flat-rate pricing plan at $99/month.
4. Slack (workplace messaging program)
Slack is a popular workplace messaging application that helps businesses that connects people to the information they want. Slack brings people together as a one unified team and takes organizational communication to the next level.
Slack enables people to work in dedicated spaces called channels where you can easily access all the information you need anytime. Every team member of the organization has access to the same information, which is easily searchable and shareable.
Slack offers integrations with hundreds of other apps to meet your project requirements.
Pricing: The Paid plan starts from $6.67 per active user, per month when billed annually.
5. Zoom (audio & video conferencing)
Zoom is probably the most popular video conferencing tool today. It has become an automatic choice for businesses to organize high-definition video meetings and webinars with widely dispersed team members, clients, and other stakeholders.
Zoom’s free plan allows you to host unlimited one-to-one or group meetings (up to 100 participants) with a 40-minute limit, and includes custom meeting IDs and screen-sharing capabilities in HD.
You don’t need to be a registered user of Zoom to participate in a video meeting.
Pricing: The Paid plan starts from $89.90 per user, per year.
6. Evernote (note taking)
Evernote is a note-taking app that eliminates the need to use traditional paper diaries and notepads. Using Evernote, businesses can immediately jot down and organize fresh ideas, minutes of meetings, daily to-dos, and so much more. You can sync all your digital notes across all devices.
Using Evernote, you can add files and photos to your text notes. Powerful search and keyword tags allow you to quickly search your notes. You can connect Evernote with your Google Calendar and bring your notes and schedule together.
You can save web pages, articles, or PDFs and store them in Evernote forever!
Pricing: The Paid plan starts from $7.99 per user/month.
7. Clockify (time tracking)
Clockify is one of the most popular free time tracker and timesheet applications that lets businesses track work hours across projects. Using Clockify, businesses can track productivity, attendance, and billable hours from anywhere as the app works across all devices.
Businesses can use this time tracking tool to find out what activities employees are spending their time on. You can generate weekly, monthly, and annual reports. Your team members get a clear view of where and when they will be working on specific projects and tasks every day.
Clockify has GPS tracking, which enables businesses to know the current location of their off-site employees.
Pricing: The Paid plan starts from $3.99 per user, per month.
8. Calendly (online appointment scheduling)
Calendly is a free online appointment scheduling software that enables businesses to schedule appointments professionally and efficiently, without resorting to time-consuming, back and forth emails.
Using Calendly, you can schedule both one-on-one, group, collective, and round-robin meetings. Calendly puts your entire meeting workflow on autopilot, sending everything from reminder emails to thank you notes, so you can focus on the work only you can do.
Pricing: The Paid plan starts from $8 per sear, per month.
9. Mailchimp (email marketing)
Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform that sends newsletters and automated emails to grow your business results. Mailchimp offers pre-designed email templates, drag-and-drop email builder, and email analytics tool to help businesses find and target your most valuable customers.
Mailchimp offers a single platform to bring your audience data, marketing channels, and insights together to enable your business reach its marketing goals faster.
Pricing: The Paid plan starts from $150 for up to 5000 email subscribers.
10. Buffer (social media marketing)
Buffer is a multi-purpose social media marketing software tool that businesses can use to draft and schedule social media posts across various platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) to drive maximum user engagement.
Businesses can also monitor their social media performance across various platforms through analytics. You can skip directly to most relevant and important comments with the help of labels and hotkeys.
24/7 customer advocates support you via email and social media so you can build and grow your brand’s presence online.
Pricing: The Paid plan starts from $5 per channel, per month.
Conclusion
Today, businesses cannot afford to lag behind in terms of using the latest tools and technology. Business management tools are helping organizations drive towards improved productivity, efficiency, and growth.
Using these tools, you can make your business operations more organized and streamlined. There are tools that allow you to manage various aspects of your business from a single place, and then there are applications that you can use along with other tools.
Assess your requirements and pick a tool that helps you achieve more in less time and effort. Good luck.
Read more: How IT Support Services Help Recession-Proof Your Business
