5 small business apps for improving productivity

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When you’re a small business owner, you are notoriously busy all hours of the day.

More often than not, you’re juggling numerous tasks at once and that makes it hard and tricky to stay on top of everything.

Especially without adding on unnecessary stress. However, you’re in luck because there are a number of online tools that can help small businesses improve productivity. Once you are on top of your schedule, you can truly make the most out of the time available to you.

These five tools cover each aspect of your business day so you can focus on the big picture.

1.  Connecteam’s employee time clock app makes it incredibly easy to track and manage your employees’ work hours on jobs and projects. But that’s not all, the time clock app also helps to improve your payroll process and to collaborate with your deskless employees like never before. It’s so easy to use that you don’t need to train a single employee, simply download the app and get to work.

Connecteam’s app makes it so easy for your employees’ to clock in and out, request absences, review current and past timesheets, and add notes with shift attachments. Plus, when an employee clocks in, they can choose a tag like job, project or customer and the app adds their GPS location stamp. As a manager, your employee time clock dashboard highlights all data so you never miss a beat.

Set the app to send push notifications to remind employees when to clock in and out. Or clock employees out automatically so they don’t work more than needed and you don’t aren’t forced to sift through the payroll mess. For no added cost, Connecteam features in-app chat (private or group) and an employee directory so you and your employees are always connected. At a fixed monthly price for up to 200 users, you can enjoy all of Connecteam’s features to better your business with costs of $29 to $79 a month. Start your free 21-day trial now.

2. Asana is a project management tool that has combined the greatest features of programs like Trello and Basecamp so you can meet all your goals. Asana merges goals with a deadline schedule so that you can create projects, set goals and stay on top of each step. Create multiple boards so tasks are divided by department or project and you can use their project timeline or team calendar to visualize where everything stands.

With Asana, you can manage all important tasks and goals from one place. And you can also integrate the program with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive and Gmail. Asana has a free version with limited features, but their in-depth premium version is available at $9.99 per month after a free trial.

3. Monday is a program that organizes all your tasks and allows for team communication. Create a project, add tasks and then steps to each task. As employees finish a task or steps of a task, they update the status so you can clearly see where each project stands. Create knowledge bases on Monday where you store documents and anything else that is related to a project.

Monday is available on desktop and mobile, plus all notifications are in real-time so you’re always connected. Their pricing plans vary on the number of users – for 5 users, it costs $29/month or for up to 10 users, it costs $59/month. You can also choose Standard, Pro and Enterprise plans.

4. Google Forms and Spreadsheets is a tool everyone is familiar with. Easily plan and manage all business needs such as tracking inventory or planning a company event. You can also create a poll or quiz, time off request forms, feedback forms, order forms, and more. Employees can work on the same file, all they need is an invite sent to their email. Forms and Spreadsheets are also responsive so you can make, edit, and respond to the forms in real-time. In addition, you can integrate Google Forms with MailChimp, Salesforce, Trello, and more.

5. Wave is an accounting software for small businesses. After you create your account, everything is set up so you can get working straight away. Wave allows you to take care of all your invoicing, accounting, and receipt scanning needs. All data is always available and is backed up so you don’t need to worry. Connect bank accounts in seconds and all transactions appear in your bookkeeping automatically, so you don’t need to do anything manually, not even receipt entry. View Wave’s reports either month-to-month or year-to-year to easily identify cash flow trends. Oh, by the way, this software is totally free. You read that right! Free!

With these five tools, your business can run smoothly, efficiently, and most of all, productively. Make every minute count by installing these five small business apps so they can do all the work for you while you focus on growing your business.