Growing your business can be difficult. Especially in a time where globalization has truly kicked in and you are not only competing with local players for prospects, you are also competing with the world around you via the Internet.
Keeping this line of thought in mind, here are some tools that will help you grow your business both offline as well as online. These tools have been selected based on their ease of access, user friendliness, affordability, support, and pricing.
Checkout
When you are running a business, you need to accept payments on your website and apps. This is where Checkout.com comes into play. A true global solution, Checkout will help you accept and receive payments from across the world like Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, among others. You will be able to connect your credit cards and local payment processors to your mobile app and website.
They have a user-friendly API that will help you connect the dots and integrate their backend with yours. A robust payment processor with useful insights and great customer support, Checkout has you covered so you can concentrate more on expanding your business.
Quickbooks
When it comes to recording your transactions and accounting entries, Quickbooks, offered by Intuit, is the best tool out there hands down. Whether you are running a store or restaurant, working as a freelancer or own an e-commerce store, Quickbooks has you covered. You can raise invoices, track when the invoice was paid, send reminders for due dates, gain insights into your financial position, create accounting entries in a balance sheet, watch your P/L account, integrate banking accounts, and create user accounts. There are a lot of other features as well to help you manage the accounting side of your business.
Infusionsoft
One of the best marketing and lead generation suites in the market, Infusionsoft is robust sales software that will help you capture leads, establish contact, follow up prospects, evaluate your results, stay organized, and grow sales.
Trello
Trello is project management software that is free to use. Following the popular Kanban methodology, Trello allows you to create cards within rows which are assigned to different users so everyone is in the loop on who is working on what.
It is like a virtual corkboard. You can create projects and break them down into different tasks and subtasks. It will help you manage tasks and employees to whom this task is assigned thereby improving productivity and reducing stress.
Evernote
People need to take notes and for good reason. With Evernote You can take audio notes, pictures, connect with other third-party, cloud-based apps and sync everything between different accounts. For most people, the free version of the app is good enough, but in case you are looking for features and advanced security, there are two other paid plans available too.
Lastpass
There are so many websites and accounts that we own and operate with that it becomes difficult to remember all the user ids and passwords. This is when Lastpass comes in handy. As the name suggests, this is the last password that you will ever have to remember. Lastpass will remember all the user id and passwords for you neatly stored in folders. Their security is top of the notch and they have mobile apps that work with mobile browsers.
Google Docs
No list can be complete without Google Docs. A suite of cloud-based apps that is free to use and provides a robust set of features. There is an option to save your work offline so you can work on it at a later time. You can access mail, spreadsheets, documents, cloud storage, and more. Google Docs is critical for anyone who is working online in any capacity.
WordPress
If you are looking to build a website or a blog or both in order to capture the imagination of your audience, which you should do irrespective of the industry you are working in, then there is probably no better solution than WordPress. WordPress is a CMS solution that will allow you to build websites, blogs, and even full blown eCommerce sites using drag and drop functionality. It is said that more than 25 percent of the web is powered by WordPress alone which is evident from its large community.
Google Analytics
When you are running your business, it is important to track results and understand user behavior. You need to understand where your customers are coming from, which marketing campaign is working and more importantly which one is not working, your audience’s demographics and so on. Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to do all this and more.
