If you’re starting to feel the strain as your business grows, with a mountain of tasks beginning to overwhelm you, it may be time to get some help. And don’t worry, you don’t need to hire anyone, there are a slew of helpful apps that can act like virtual staff and help you run your business more efficiently. Here are our top five picks..
The more successful you get, the busier your schedule becomes. As a small business or even a one-man-band you can’t just go out and hire yourself an executive assistant. That’s where Toggl comes in. Described as “insanely simple time tracking”, it aims to “kill timesheets” so it’s of particular benefit to people who need to bill different clients for their time.
You can also measure whether you’re spending too much time on a particular project or task, or see if there are jobs you haven’t billed for. Toggl also offers a button that works with many other online tools, such as Google Drive, Asana and Zendesk, so you can record how much time you spend on different tasks in those.
Deputy is an Australian made app for managing staff, whether casual, part time or shift. It makes rostering a breeze, improving communications between managers and workers. It also lets you track performance and seamlessly integrate payroll.
Mobile access also means you can see what’s going on in your workplace, even when you’re not there. Employees can tap to clock on and off, like a virtual timesheet, and it even has facial recognition technology so it knows who’s using it.
CamScanner turns your phone into a document scanning and sharing app. It automatically detects how to crop a photo of a document and flatten it so it’s not distorted. It can then enhance its text and balance its colour, making it clear and readable, even if you took it in poor light. You can then sync, share and manage different documents on other devices.
CamScanner lets you annotate images with pen tools for “lifelike handwriting”, and it can even do text recognition, converting document images to text so you can edit them. A batch copy feature helps speed up your scanning work.
If you want an alternative to a traditional till, Vend can turn your iPad into a cash register. It’s cloud-based point-of-sale, inventory management and customer loyalty software for iPad, Mac and PC. It works with leading merchant providers so you can choose the best way to accept payments.
It also connects to accounting, eCommerce and staff rostering apps, helping you run your business entirely online. Vend also includes powerful back-office tools to give you more insight into your business, helping you better match supply and demand. It works seamlessly if you have multiple sales outlets, with live reporting letting you check any store at any time.
Are your spreadsheets getting into such a mess that it feels like a pen-and-paper ledger would be easier? If so, it’s time to consider something that’s built for the task. Reckon One is so easy to use that you can practically be your own accountant. You also get to design it exactly how you like, choosing just the features and modules your business needs.
Maybe you just want the core features of tracking receipts and payments? Or perhaps you also want to send invoices, or have automatic bank feeds? With Reckon One, you only have to pay for what you currently need.
Technology these days doesn’t require an IT department and expensive hardware. Thanks to the cloud, it’s accessible to anyone and affordable by businesses of all sizes. Don’t sit around struggling and drowning in paperwork, get some smart software to do the heavy lifting for you.
If you’d like to learn more about how to find the right software that can help you with your business’ needs, download our free ebook ‘9 questions to ask when choosing your accounting software’ by clicking on the button below.
