We are always looking for tools to improve business efficiency, productivity and competence. Sage Drive gives you the freedom to work with your accounts data whenever and wherever. We asked our Sage Business Expert Anil Stocker to tell us his top 6 smart business tools that he uses to improve his business efficiency.
An oldie but definitely a goodie. Evernote allows you to store notes, ideas, ramblings, photos and voice reminders and makes them all searchable across devices. Write to-do-lists and notes on the train to work and when you arrive, they’ll already be synced to your desktop. Evernote also allows you to instantly transform your notes into simple presentations to share with colleagues – very clever and much more efficient than spending 2 hours on PowerPoint. Better yet, you can take pictures of your handwritten notes and Evernote will recognise (most of) what you’ve written and make it searchable. It’s not 100% recognition, but it’s pretty good and making written notes searchable is a fantastic feature.
This is an organisation and management tool that allows for collaboration and multi user access. It lets you organise your projects into simplified boards, e.g. To Do, Doing, On Hold and Done. You can assign tasks, make comments – using people’s handles so that they get sent a notification – upload documents and use a scrum plugin to rate the difficulty/importance of a task, set checklists and deadlines. It’s a simple yet versatile tool.
Receipt Bank is an incredibly popular and simple tool that eliminates the need for manual data entry when handling receipts, invoices and other such mountains of paper. The app can then push your data into accounting packages or it can be downloaded as a spreadsheet which can then be used to create expense reports. Receipt bank helpfully integrates with a range of other products and services including Sage 50, Xero, FreeAgent and Dropbox.
A powerful free tool, Google Analytics allows you to analyse visitor traffic, where they came from, the devices used, and the journey they take on your website. You can also see how people interact with your site: what they’re looking for and what they like to further refine and improve. Google Analytics does a vast array of things, including plugging into AdWords and Google Display Network to make your general online marketing efforts more effective.
A bit of a tricky one to explain, ‘If This Then That’ lets you set triggers, so that when something happens (on over 160 products and services, including social media) it sets off an automatic reaction. You choose both the trigger and the reaction and the app allows you to set up ‘recipes’ such as ‘If someone comments on my blog or website, send me a text message’ or ‘If I miss a phone call from an important contact, send me an email’. It’s an incredibly useful tool with a pretty infinite number of possibilities.
MailChimp makes email marketing really easy. You can use their templates or make some of your own. Upload your lists, segment them, track opens and clicks, see the replies. A great tool for small businesses.
Honourable mentions:
- Wufoo: Wufoo makes building online forms for those that don’t know how to code super easy and then track the data.
- Zendesk: A customer service software that deals with ticket requests in any format, self-service help and data-lead customer relationships.
- Chaser: Chaser specialises in automating invoice chasing to help growing businesses overcome their cashflow issues.
What are yours top smart business tools?
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