Great apps for small business owners
Thanks to the diverse range of apps designed to help you to run your business better, as a business owner, you now have the freedom to do pretty much anything you want – straight from your smartphone.
From streamlining communication with your team to improving organisation and time management, you can bet there’s an app to help you out. But with so many options to explore, how do you find the ones that are best to meet your business needs?
This post will make your decision easier with a roundup of some of the best and most popular small business apps you can choose from. Unless otherwise stated, all apps are available for both iOS and Android!
Social media tools
What if you don’t have the time to manage and monitor each of your social media accounts all day? With this app, you can schedule text, video or picture posts and track their stats across multiple social media accounts.
The free version is enough for any small business to get by, but the paid versions allow you to connect even more accounts and schedule a higher number of posts.
Over by GoDaddy is perfect for entrepreneurs and small business owners that like to create and share visual content. Starting from a vast library of hand-curated, professionally designed templates and layouts, anyone can create professional ads, branded content, logos and stunning stories in minutes — no design experience needed.
Looking to save time and boost your social media productivity? Hootsuite is another social media scheduling app that allows you to manage multiple social media accounts and plan your posts ahead of time.
You’ll get a free trial when you first download the app, but will eventually need to upgrade to Hootsuite Professional for access to more social accounts and extra features.
Productivity
With the SignEasy app, chasing and being chased up for signatures is a thing of the past – and you don’t even need to worry about keeping a pen handy. Simply download the app to your device to start signing forms and sending documents out for signatures in just a few taps of your phone.
WordPress
If you’ve been thinking about building or refining your own website, you could try WordPress from GoDaddy , which is quick and easy to set up and comes with SEO built in if you go for a higher package. Then, manage it all from the WordPress app, where you can make edits to your website, upload blog posts, manage your settings and more.
Microsoft Office
Running a business means you’re likely to often be on the go. Now, what if you could work on all your projects during your travels? Or anywhere at all? Not only would that save time, but it would increase your productivity a huge amount. If that sounds like something you’d like, you should explore the Microsoft Office 365 plans from GoDaddy , where you’ll get the full suite of your favourite Office apps on your mobile device – as well as the desktop and online versions, giving you the freedom to work however and wherever you’d like.
Load shedding is a fact of life, and nothing is worse than being stuck without power when you have work to do. This app makes it a bit more manageable and predictable with push notifications and forecasts, so you can plan your life around Eskom.
Collaboration and Communication
The Slack desktop and mobile app is essential for anyone who works within a team for their business. This app will allow you to communicate with ease, through direct messaging or calls. You can also keep these conversations organised and categorised and create groups so that everything is streamlined. For extra productivity, you have the ability to share and edit documents as a team and integrate tools such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Asana for added ease.
Keep all your files in one place, access them on-the-go, scan documents with the built-in scanner – these are just a few of the many business-friendly benefits that come with the Dropbox App. But it’s the collaboration-specific elements of this app that make it a must-have. For example, you can create a shared drive among your team and share, edit and sync your documents together – from any location.
This app allows you to create a board or list layout where you can add and organise tasks, reminder, ideas and more. Share your boards with your team so you all can comment and send updates on the progress of each task.
Payment Processing & Invoicing
iKhokha is a mobile point of sale solution that enables business owners to accept card transactions via a range of card machines that work with the iKhokha smartphone app. You can use it to accept Visa and MasterCard debit and credit card payments, tender cash and mobile transactions, sell value-added services such as mobile airtime, and monitor and track sales performance.
Backed by Standard Bank, SnapScan is a safe and secure way to make, receive and keep track of payments anytime, anywhere. SnapScan offers customised solutions for a variety of point-of-sale, e-commerce and invoicing systems.
Sage Business Cloud Accounting
This online accounting software is designed for small businesses. Sage offers a range of subscription-based solutions, from easy quoting and invoicing software for the smallest businesses to more feature-rich accounting solutions for growing and mid-sized companies. There is a mobile app for working on the road.
Xero’s online accounting software lives in the cloud, allowing you to automate everyday business tasks, get up-to-date financials and run your business – from wherever you are. Real-time updates mean no more waiting to learn the health of your finances.
Marketing
What better way to collect customer information than surveys, which you can create for free using the SurveyMonkey app? You’ll be able to create surveys and analyse results on-the-go. Paid plans open you to a range of options for your business including collaboration, customisation options and more.
GoDaddy Websites + Marketing does exactly what it says – you can use it to build a great-looking website and there’s also a range of marketing tools included so you can promote your business. Websites + Marketing includes Email Marketing, social media marketing, and provides advice on how to improve your marketing efforts.
Time Management and organisation
From note-taking to scanning paper documents and files, Evernote is perfect for the small business owner who has a lot of work and ideas that need to be kept categorised and organised. Collect and organise your PDF files, web clipping, audio and image files, videos and even sketches – and save them all to the cloud for peace-of-mind that they’re always safe. The paid Business plan will allow you to share and collaborate on notes across your team.
How would you like a virtual travel assistant that takes the stress out of travelling for business? That’s essentially what the Tripit app is. All you have to do is book your arrangements – flight, hotel, car or whatever they may be, and forward them Tripit. You’ll be sent back a full itinerary and have easy access to all the important details of your travel plans in one place. You’ll also have real-time flight alerts and queue times sent straight to your phone.
With the Be Focused app for iOS, you’ll be able to split the time you work on a task up in to intervals – with breaks allocated for checking all those distracting emails or text messages. You can use this app to structure your whole working day and then analyse the built-in reports to see how well you did once the day is over.
Now you have a range of apps you can use to manage every part of your business life, the question is: which ones are best for your business needs? It could be time to start brainstorming what areas of your business could be improved, then selecting an app from the list to help you make lasting changes.
