Top 10 Life-Changing Apps and Services for Entrepreneurs and Small Businesses
By Mike Peterson
We all know that running a business — any business — is hard. Whether you’re a startup CEO, independent entrepreneur, or the owner and only employee of a small business, just managing the day-to-day can be a challenge.
Luckily, these apps and services can make life a little easier for you and your team.
Communication can be tricky, especially when managing a team of remote workers. Slack makes the process easier with an intuitive and powerful messaging and collaboration platform. Instant message conversations can be organized into private or public channels, and the app makes it easy to bring documents and other files into the workflow. The platform also automatically archives messages, notifications and files — so you can easily pull up a past conversation with a powerful search tool.
Slack is free to try, with additional features and controls available for a set monthly price. The app is available to download in the Mac app store.
Finances are the lifeblood of any business, and Mint makes it easy for you to keep track of them. Mint is an all-in-one money management, bill payment, credit score monitoring, budgeting and investing platform. The app lets you get track and pay bills, account-related alerts, schedule payments, and more — all from within the app. Additionally, you can add multiple bank or credit accounts, so you have can keep tabs on all of your money, without switching between various banking apps.
In our increasingly internet-reliant age, many businesses live and die by the quality of their websites. But analytics and metrics, which can be key to website success, are spread out and hard to understand. That’s where Pocket Analytics comes in. The apps pulls data and metrics from a variety of tracking systems — Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, StatCounter and Bitly, to name a few — and organizes them into easy-to-use and customizable dashboards. For more complicated tracking, you can create multiple dashboards and label them accordingly.
Quip is a collaboration app that makes it easy for teams to work together on documents. Notes, documents, spreadsheets and to-do lists can easily be shared with and edited by team members, and an embedded chat system makes it easy to collaborate without relying on email. Files can be imported from a number of sources, including Evernote, Dropbox and Google Drive. Quip is free for personal use, and is available to groups or companies for a monthly subscription fee.
Specifically created with the small business or independent entrepreneur in mind, Wave is a free accounting tool that makes tracking payments, expenses and finances easy. Businesses and users can track sales, receive payments, create, send and manage invoices, and pay employees.
The app can even generate its own accounting reports so businesspeople can be ready for tax season. Best of all, for those who flunked math, the creators promise an intuitive and easy interface with no accounting jargon. Wave’s basic features are free to use, with certain services available via a pay-as-you-go method. The company’s services apps are available here.
Even in our digital-sutured world, running a business can still involve stacks of paper documents. Evernote Scannable lets you automatically scan documents, contracts, receipts, meeting notes, or basically any other piece of paper you might encounter. Scan a business card, and the information can easily be turned into contacts with LinkedIn details. The app also works with Evernote, and its proprietary ScanSnap Scanner.
No list of business-related apps would be complete without mentioning LinkedIn. The largest professional social media site in the world, LinkedIn’s mobile app lets you network with other professionals, find and recruit new talent, and keep an eye out for potential job opportunities. In additional to individual professional accounts, there are also profiles for companies and groups. LinkedIn is completely free to download and use, with some premium features available at an additional cost.
For startups or businesses that run through a lot of projects, Trello is an easy way to keep track and manage workflow. Tasks are assigned to “cards” that are placed on the Trello board — which you can then add members, comments and attachments to. Managers can furnish each task with deadlines, labels and checklists to make it easy for teams to get information at a glance and collaborate on the go — and when a task is changed or updated, each team member gets a notification via the smartphone app. Trello is a free-to-use app, with certain additional features available via a monthly subscription.
Nobody likes tracking expenses while on business trips or outings, but Expensify can make it a little easier to bear. Take a picture of a relevant receipt, and the app will automatically pull information from it and add it to an expense report. Alternatively, a debit or credit card can be linked to the app — allowing for expense charge to easily be accounted for. A built-in expense report creator lets you easily put together a professional-looking document. Expensify is $5 per month for team users, and $9 per month for corporate users.
Email marketing can be a useful and even essential tool for business and entrepreneurs of all types — and MailChimp makes it an easy medium to break into. Within the app, you can easily build and manage mailing lists, as well as create and send well-designed newsletters and email templates to those lists. MailChimp also gives you statistics and performance reports, so you can tailor emails and newsletter to better fit your audience or customers.
MailChimp is free to use — as long as you’re sending under 12,000 emails a month to fewer than 2,000 subscribers. Any more than that, and the service offers additional service on a pay-as-you-go plan.
