10+ Best Tools for Small Business You Need to Know About

Running own business is a dream come true for a lot of people. But the journey isn’t smooth. 

Building a product, meeting your clients, managing your team, administrative tasks, finances, and maintaining a top-notch online presence are never-ending tasks. As a small business owner, you’ll quickly become overwhelmed or exhausted, to say the least.

Investing in the right tools for small business will make each team member productive, and ultimately, you can push your small business forward. This article aims to help you find the right tools to skyrocket your small business’s success. Read it till the end for the ten best tools for small businesses that’ll take up your repetitive work so that you can focus on the other crucial aspects of your business.

Graphic Design

You need to maintain an active social media presence no matter which industry you’re in. And you can’t afford to share poorly designed content as it’ll impact your brand reputation. A graphic design tool will help you consistently create great-looking designs.

DocHipo

DocHipo is an affordable graphic design software and alternative to canva for small business. You can create social media post graphics, infographics, blog banners, etc., for your business website’s blog, marketing collaterals like flyers, posters, etc. Each document type is further categorized into various industries and occasions.

Let’s see some of the categories under YouTube Thumbnails.

Check out DocHipo’s Templates Page to explore each of them.

You can fully customize the templates to suit your business needs with the help of various design widgets DocHipo offers.

The video guide below will help you get started with DocHipo.

Pricing:

Below is the yearly pricing model of DocHipo.

Project Management 

How will you feel if all the projects are scattered, and you’re unaware of their status? 

Feeling stress will be an understatement. Investing in tools for small business that help you keep everything organized is the way to go.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a simple project management and real-time communication software for small business. It allows you to break up work into separate projects, containing each people involved, related documents, discussions, etc. It lets you create tasks, and to-do lists, set deadlines, and assign them to respective team members. Its built-in communication features include private messaging, project-related group chat, and message boards for team discussions. The integrated calendar feature allows you to sync all team member’s Google and Outlook calendars and iCals, so you know their availability.

Basecamp allows you to give your clients custom access to track the work progress. It saves time, preventing back-and-forth work status updates with clients. Each Basecamp project workspace provides a space for sharing relevant documents and files.

ProofHub

If you’re looking for a one-stop shop to manage all of your project-related needs, look no further than ProofHub. It is an all-in-one project management and team collaboration software that allows teams to plan, assign, prioritize, and organize tasks, manage communication, share files, and access resources—all in one place. It is considered ideal for small-to-medium-to-large-scale organizations that require individual task oversight.

With ProofHub, teams are able to stay in control of their work processes, stay focused on their goals, and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. Users can assign and prioritize projects to one or more team members, with deadlines, time estimates, and custom labels included. By using subtasks, users can divide tasks into more manageable chunks. Additionally, it has file attachments, dependencies, milestones, and time tracking.

ProofHub eliminates the need to invest in multiple tools as it offers an all-in-one solution for managing projects and collaborating with teams working in any space or time zone. From assigning tasks to visualizing their progress in multiple views (boards, Gantt charts, or calendars), communicating instantly via its live chat feature, and documenting everything in Notes, ProofHub offers it all under one roof.

Pricing:

Invoicing 

One of the intimidating aspects of running a business is dealing with invoicing and managing finances. An invoicing and accounting software like FreshBooks comes to the rescue.

Freshbooks

Freshbooks is one of the best tools for small business owners for invoicing with accounting capabilities. This cloud-based tool provides a simple and efficient way to create and send custom invoices and manage and track expenses, invoices, receipts, reports, and time.

Instead of creating new invoices from the start, you can convert estimates and proposals into invoices in just two clicks.  You can add a deposit request or discount in just a few clicks. Freshbooks makes it easy to format your invoices using the drag and drop tool.

You can customize invoices to align with your business’s branding by adding your business logo, changing the color or fonts, etc. Once you send an invoice, you can check the time your clients viewed them. You don’t need to manually track how much your client paid or the corresponding due amount. You can also send recurring invoices and payment reminders with Freshbooks’s automation features.

Pricing:

Payments 

The need for electronic payment is ever-growing, with more and more businesses shifting online and more customers loving online shopping. So you need to make the transaction process as smooth and secure as possible.

Paypal

PayPal for small businesses makes the payment procedure easier with diverse financing options. Creating a business account on PayPal is relatively straightforward. Select your small business’s account type and provide the necessary information, and you’re done. Because of its security protocols, if your small business offers it as a payment method, it’ll result in a lower cart abandonment rate.

What makes PayPal ideal for small businesses wanting to get cost-effective with online transactions is that you don’t have to own a merchant account. Its “PayPal invoicing” feature helps you create invoices within minutes. PayPal supports major shopping platforms like Shopify, Magneto, CS-Cart, etc.

Scheduling 

The meeting scheduling with clients, or your own team members, needs to be quick and hassle-free.

Calendly

Calendly makes scheduling one-on-one or group meetings easier for your business team members or clients. It also eliminates double bookings. You can feed your Calendly account with your preferred date and time and share its link for others to schedule meetings based on your availability.

Calendly is integrated with Google Calendar, Outlook, Office 365, iCloud, and applications like Slack, Salesforce, Zapier, and MailChimp.

Pricing:

Email Marketing

Products or services marketed through emails are still the preferred marketing medium for 73% of consumers. 

Mailchimp

The main reason why MailChimp is an excellent choice for small businesses is its simple and intuitive interface. In its free plan, you can send emails to one group of up to 2,000 contacts; that’ll work fine for a small business wanting to be consistent with its emails.

MailChimp’s marketing automation features let you send automated welcome emails, newsletters, offers, promotions, etc. You don’t need to watch any tutorial to be able to use this; it’s that intuitive.

You can split your audience depending on their interests and preferences. Then send them targeted emails. Another highlight of this software for small business is that you get a comprehensive report to check the performance of your emails. The detailed analytics include open and click rates, the revenue generated from your specific email, etc.

Pricing:

Team Messaging 

Ensuring your team communication leaves no space for confusion and that everyone is on the same page is a crucial aspect of a business.

Slack

Slack allows internal and external team members to work together across locations, time zones, and individual working styles. You can think of it as a digital HQ that speeds up communication and completes the work efficiently.

In slack, you work with organized spaces called channels that are created with a specific project discussion point in mind. Slack is integrated with over 2,400 other apps, such as Google Calendar, Zoom, and project management tools, such as Asana or Trello, and Zapier. It’ll prevent you from switching between different tabs, increasing productivity and efficiency.

Pricing:

Website Builder 

A functional website will make your small business feel more professional and increase your credibility. Look at the website builder below that will do your job effectively and quickly.

Wix

Wix is a cloud-based web development software for small business. You can create your eye-catching website using Wix ADI (artificial design intelligence) or their editor. You can choose from over 800 fully customizable business templates for different industries. Also, you can create a business website from scratch. When you publish your website, free web hosting is automatically incorporated into it, so you don’t need to worry about finding an external host.

You can customize and add your personal touch to your small business website with more than a thousand intuitive design features like fonts, image galleries, animations, vectors, other graphics, etc. Incorporate business apps from Wix or third-party programs like contact forms, social plug-ins, e-mail marketing, online store, etc. The cherry on the cake is that Wix’s built-in SEO tools will help boost your website rankings.

Pricing:

Contract Management 

A proper contract management system is essential to safeguard your interests, save time and money and reduce errors.

DocuSign

DocuSign is one of the best contract management tools for small business for creating documents, collaborating, and keeping all your contracts in one place to organize them better. This way, you can search and locate your existing contracts and report on their status faster. DocuSign enables multi-level authentication, ensuring that only the right people can access your document. You can use it both Standalone and also integrated with Salesforce.

Performance Management 

Your small business needs to pay attention to performance management to strategically align all your employees, systems, and resources towards the company’s objectives and growth. 

15Five

15Five is a performance management software for small business to manage organizational goals efficiently. You can conduct productive team meetings, share employees’ challenges, achievements, etc. It is a complete solution that provides you with software, community, and education to create successful managers, dedicated employees, and ultimately a top-performing organization.

Pricing:

Final Words on Best Tools for Small Business 

Using the right tools will help your small business run smoothly. You can opt for the free trial options for the above-mentioned small business tools and software. Make your customers choose your business repeatedly because of your products or services and the efficient and risk-free system you make them go through. So be strategic with how you operate your business, where you should invest your time and energy, and where to implement tools.

FAQ

What are the best tools for small businesses?

The tools you need for your small business to run smoothly and efficiently include DocHipo, Basecamp, Proofhub, Freshbooks, Paypal, Calendly, Mailchimp, Slack, Wix, DocuSign, etc. These tools for small businesses will make your job easier in various aspects, such as graphic designing, project management, invoicing, payments, scheduling, email marketing, team messaging, website building, etc.

What are social media management tools?

Social media management tools are software that helps you manage your social media accounts across multiple platforms in a single dashboard. The management includes planning, scheduling, uploading, and analyzing social media posts, interacting with followers, etc. Buffer is one of the best social media management tools for saving much back-and-forth time.

Are there any free tools for small businesses?

You can use the free version of certain tools for small businesses with limited features for various aspects of your business. They include DocHipo, Slack, Mailchimp, Calendly, Paypal, etc.