If you’re not taking advantage of the amazing free apps out there, it’s time to listen up!
Times are a’changing, and companies are making sure our lives are easier and more productive than ever. These cross-functional, industry-wide apps cut your email inboxes in half, promote sharing, and allow social media and document management to be quick and easy.
Check out our current must-haves:
Slack
It’s completely safe to say we’re obsessed with the tool that allows our team to communicate with ease. In addition to standard instant messaging, Slack allows you to create separate chat channels for each project, so your messaging in each channel correlates to a specific topic. The appropriate team members can be added to their project channels and collaborate no matter where in the world they are. Our email inboxes started to make cricket sounds after we implemented this for everyday communication!
Image by slack.com
Google Drive
East of Ellie lives on Google Drive. Whether we are drafting new blog content or creating a company wide status sheet, the sharing functionalities on this cloud-based app allows you to pick up where you left off on any device. With the suggestions feature, collaborating on a document, spreadsheet or presentation has never been simpler for us.
Image by drive.google.com
Dropbox
Without Dropbox, sharing large documents and photos would be a lot more difficult. We primarily use it to share event photos with clients and transfer large files, but the opportunities for storing content and transferring files are endless for your small biz needs!
Image by dropbox.com
Hootsuite
Many small businesses (including ours) don’t have an entire social media department, yet constantly marketing your small biz is ridiculously important. Hootsuite acts as our own department and managing weeks worth of content only requires a click of a button. With the ability to schedule posts in advance, you “set it and forget it” which saves time and stress.
Image by hootsuite.com
Freshbooks
Freshbooks is an inexpensive, but extremely valuable tool we use to manage everything accounting related. This tool is made for small businesses, and does everything from online invoicing, to expense management, to time tracking. Manually balancing your check book is so 2002.
Image by freshbooks.com
Do you have any apps you can’t live without? Let us know in the comments!