5 NEW APPS TO HELP YOUR BUSINESS

Whether you need to market with ecommerce, social media, membership platforms, videos or landing pages – there’s an application out there to help your business out.

Here are some tried and tested ones.

Freshbooks

Intuit’s QuickBooks might be the acknowledged market leader in business accounting software, but Brian Lee, president of Revelation PR, Advertising and Social Media, believes FreshBooks is a versatile alternative.

A cloud-based accounting app, it handles functions such as time measurement, expenses, invoices, and online payments. If you need to add your time and your billable hours, or if you want to accept payments through a service like PayPal, you can do that through FreshBooks. It also integrates with other apps out there like Basecamp, Gmail, and MailChimp.

FreshBooks has changed the way business owners communicate with clients, enabling it to provide a more detailed accounting of its work. You can post the time, the project, and the actual work done straight in FreshBooks, and then it allows one to create invoicing from those entries – thus eliminating a lot of overhead, while keeping records really pristine.It’s really well documented for clients.

The app is designed to scale up, so while it’s offered free to very small businesses, it grows along with the organization. Users are charged based on the number of clients they manage, and it’s free for the first three clients.

Toggl

Toggl, another cloud-based app, is used for both time tracking and time management. Business owners can quickly add clients and projects, and choose the level of details for each one. This is valuable if you have a database of clients which you take good care of.

Toggl can be a great tool to see how you are allocating your day, and if you can be more efficient with your time. With Toggl, management can see if people are misallocating time or spending too much time on low-priority projects. If they need to plan future projects, they can look at historical data for a similar project and use it as a planning guide.

Toggl can be used on both smartphones and computers, and the payment model is based on the number of users within a company.

Skype

With Skype’s free video call feature, one can get face-to-face dimensions in a meeting, even when the people conversing are hundreds of miles apart physically. It is ideal for businesspeople who frequently travel. You can also hold face-to-face meetings – no matter how often.

Perhaps that comfort level stems from the fact that the images are pretty clear, whether they are transmitted over a phone or a computer, yet be able to tell whether the other party is paying attention. Indeed, the app accommodates people who want to pick up on visual cues.There is an added dimension that you lose when you don’t have video or you are not seeing someone face-to-face – which is important if you want your people’s 100% attention.

In one sentence, Skype’s main feature is to allow people continents apart to speak like they were just beside each other.

Dropbox

Dropbox has a simple purpose – the cloud-based file-sharing and file backup service enables one to share large files, including photos and videos – files which email struggles to transfer.

Word files, databases, spreadsheets, PowerPoints, PDFs, and pretty much anything else under the 2-gigabyte limit of the free version – name it, it will safely be stored in Dropbox. It’s another example of how free apps serve small businesses that are wise enough to take advantage of them.

Anyone who is allowed a share of any file – np matter where they may be – can open documents and files for editing or reference.

Eventbrite

Hosting events takes engagement with your audience one step further by allowing them to meet the people behind the brand while learning something new or having fun (or both). But what happens when the event is over? Thanks to the AWeber and Eventbrite integration, you can now add event attendees to the AWeber list of your choice.

Who should use this: If your business hosts any sort of event, including online events, this tool will be a big help.