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There is hardly a business owner that doesn’t want to see more numbers in the “+” column at the end of the day. We’re all trying to find new and innovative ways to make our businesses more competitive and operate at higher levels of efficiency. Now not all of us have companies that employ 20 odd people where you could delegate many office automation tasks, and if that’s you, you’re going to need some guidance on finding the best help when you need it.

A businesswoman looking at her iPad

As a small business owner, your business is likely to be most significantly impacted by three basic principles:

Marketing, accounting and operations.

Accounting manages money flow in and out of business and takes care of compliance and regulatory functions. From marketing, one can extract sales, communications, public relations and research. Then some operations overlap into most business areas but could also more specifically relate to logistics, supply chain, deliveries, manufacture, and so forth.

That could sound a little daunting if you’re just starting, but the good news is that thanks to the massive advances in technology we’ve all experienced of late, we have at least as many solutions to our problems, in one guise or the other. We’re going to have a look at just a few.

Best Online Marketing Services

The function of marketing has finally made it online, and there are now tons of apps and online services that can help you manage your marketing more effectively.

Buffer, Hootsuite, Facebook Pages Manager, Facebook Ads Manager, Tailwind and Later can all interact with your existing platforms and make your marketing not just more competitive but easier to manage holistically.

Best Accounting Apps

Quickbooks, Xero, Freshbooks, FreeAgent and Wave provide fabulous accounting solutions for small businesses. These are names you’ve probably heard before, but if you’re not using them, look online and see which provides a better match to your business.

The great thing about these apps is that they can be configured (by and large) to meet local regulatory and compliance-based requirements.

Best Operational Services and Apps Online

For your inventory, SOS inventory and Delivered are top-rated apps and can be customised to your business model reasonably easily.  Square, PayPal Here, and Quickbooks Go Payment can all facilitate your payments online or as a POS-based system, Tsheets, Gusto, and TeamDeck are great apps for tracking managing time management systems and can be used to track KPIs as well.

For document management or managing paper trails, you can learn how to convert tiff to pdf documents that can go some way to digitising an area of your business that could save you a lot of time and money.

These online services make ideal companions for your small business. It’s up to you to see which one works best for you, and remember that improving the efficiency and sustainability goals of your business is in some ways not just desirable but also becoming more mandatory. 

It can seem daunting at times to embrace new forms of technology that we’ve never used before, but that’s why it’s so essential that you find the tools that work for you. Remember, time is, after all, money.

These online services make ideal companions for your small business.

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