These 6 Apps For Small Business Owners Can Help Save Time & Reduce Stress!

Welcome! If you caught last week’s blog, you may remember I shared my top 6 ‘Go To’ technologies for small businesses to help with HR. This week, I’m delighted to share my top 6 apps for small business owners. These are aides that I believe are helpful for business owners running a small to medium-sized business, to save precious time, cut down on your admin and keep organised!

So, without further ‘a do’ – from scheduling to admin, from invoicing to de-stressing, here are:

My Favourite Apps For Small Business Owners

FreeAgent

I’ve been utilising FreeAgent since I started my business and the best bit is that it comes free with my Natwest business bank account so I am saving money too! I can link FreeAgent to my bank, expenses card and Go Cardless account for all those lovely Direct Debits. Invoices can be created at the touch of a button and you can set them to reoccur each month which is wonderful as you never have to remember (or forget!) to send an invoice again. Additionally, if you link FreeAgent to your GoCardless account, you can also collect Direct Debits so you don’t even have to call or email clients asking for money ever again!

In addition to these apps for small business owners, I am going to sneak in an extra bit of tech here – and that is Receipt Bank which I mentioned in my last blog.

Asana

I currently employ a couple of Virtual Assistants who help keep me in check with my admin and marketing needs. To help manage the work they do for me, as well as keeping track of the client work which Pete and I perform, I use Asana.

Asana helps me to easily allocate work to different people, complete with due dates. It’s a really useful app and it helps me keep track on progress, but the best bit is that it has helped keep email communication to a minimum. Instead of my VA’s emailing me every time they complete a task or have a query, they log their question in the appropriate place for me to pick up when I log in to Asana, which means I don’t have to deal with it in my inbox too 🙂

I also love that I can link Asana to Toggl; which is another of my favourite apps for small business owners. Speaking of which…

Toggl

Toggl is one of my go-to apps for small business owners and an incredibly useful one which we use for time tracking. It helps us keep track of the time we spend on different projects or pieces of work throughout the day. With Toggl, we can always make sure that we are spending the right amount of time on each different project for our clients, meaning we can guarantee we are always giving value to of our clients.

Zapier

Zapier helps you integrate various online apps and platforms that you may use to run your business and so helps you save time and keep things simple. In short, it helps to ‘join the dots’ between the various systems I use.

Using Zapier means I don’t have to manually duplicate information. For example, if someone registers for one of my courses on Eventbrite, this act is immediately integrated with my CRM system, so the information that someone has bought a ticket gets added there too.

Other Zapier integrations include saving any meeting notes I make in Onenote to Asana, and using Acuity Scheduling as a meeting booking tool which gets linked to my diary.

Keap

I use Keap (formerly InfusionSoft) as my CRM system. At first, I was a little intimidated by all its various functionalities, but after the first onboarding call, I was so pleased I’d switched to using it.

The Keap app is affordable for a small business like mine and fits perfectly for any businesses growing needs. With a little willingness to learn, this program really does it all, and their customer service (especially the Live Chat) is a joy to use!

Headspace

Last but by no means least, this one is more of a ‘wellbeing’ aide. Being a business owner can bring stress to your life, and my personal recommendation. I find one of the best apps for small business owners to combat stress is the wonderful meditation app, Headspace.

It’s a simple, aesthetically pleasing app to help you learn how to meditate and live the mindful, zen-like life of a Buddhist monk! In particular, Headspace helps me sleep, and the focus me for exercises I usually perform at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on the days where I’m struggling to get through the ‘to do’ list! Headspace definitely helps keep me on track for the last few hours of the working day.

I hope this list of my favourite apps for small business owners may have given a few ideas to help improve your productivity.

Please feel free to contact me if you’d like any more information on other HR apps that are available to make your life a little easier too.