Rachel Smith June 11, 2021 As a small business owner, you wear many hats, particularly if you’re doing it all by yourself or only with a small team. This is why you’ll need all the help you can get with these 7 amazing tools for small business owners.
Canva
One of my personal favourites and I use it every day is Canva. Canva is a free to use online tool where you can create images, graphics and designs for your business. It has pre-built templates to spark creativity as well as template sizes ready for pretty much anything from social media to business cards, posters and more.
It is used by thousands of people every day and even if you’re not the creative type it’s simple and easy to use with a drag and drop editor. With the Pro version you can get access to more of their library of stock photography and elements. The best part is that the Pro version is only £10.99 per month or you can get a discount if paid annually.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the best social media schedules on the market. As a busy business owner, you’ll want to spend most of your time actually running your business which is where a social media scheduler comes in.
Spending some time either each week or month, creating social media content pillars (2-4 core topics) and scheduling them across your social channels will free up your time to concentrate on running your business.
Meanwhile, your social media channels are active and posting regular content for your followers. Just remember to check in on them to like posts, reply to comments and generally engage with your audience.
Hootsuite starts from £39 per month and gives you a 30-day free trial so you can see if it’s right for you.
Google Workspace
Google Workspace makes collaborative working easy. If you have a small to large team, making sure you’re able to collaborate over email, documents, spreadsheets and more is essential in keeping the communication flowing.
The best part about Google Workspace is that it’s all stored remotely, so you can jump from your laptop to your iPad to your desktop and work from anywhere and continue working on whatever you need to.
LastPass
As you may know, we already have so many passwords we need to remember in our day to day lives and when you’re running a business there’s no worse time to forget a password and lock yourself out of an account than when you’ve got things to do.
That’s where LastPass comes in. LastPass is a password manager that you can store your passwords so you have access across all your devices. When you go to log in, LastPass will autofill your login information for that site so all it takes is 1 click to log in anywhere.
Perfect for keeping track of your passwords, and sharing them with your team securely. LastPass is completely free to use and can be added as a Google Chrome extension.
QuickBooks
Running a business involves a lot of accounting and if needs to be right every time. But you don’t have the time as a business owner to keep track of every order, purchase invoice and expense. Quickbooks is great accounting software for small businesses that’s smart, with expert support.
Quickbooks start from as little as £1.20 per month for a company that is currently 90% off for 4 months, then £12 per month after that. And £0.80p per month for a sole trader with 90% off for the first 4 months and then £8 per month after that. You can even add your payroll to the Quickbooks software to make managing your team’s payroll easier.
Trello
Trello is also something else I use on a daily basis. Trello allows you to organise, prioritise and assign tasks through boards, lists and cards.
Trello is a great collaboration tool that allows you to visually see where a project is up to. Each card allows you to add as much detail as possible about the project, whilst attaching any necessary documentation or other Trello cards.
From to-do lists to assigning tasks to team members, this has everything you need to manage tasks and projects. Trello is free to use but has a paid plan for some of its other features.
Grammarly
Lastly, there’s no worse thing than a typo or mis-spelling when you’re representing your business and want to be professional but a simple mistake stops that from happening.
Grammarly will catch any mistakes, spelling grammar or otherwise and make suggestions for you. Even while you’re writing an email or drafting a document. It even has other suggestion types such as how to rephrase something or how something comes across, whether it’s confident, or neutral for example.
Grammarly is free to use but does have a subscription for additional features such as readability, word choice, plagiarism, fluency, and much more.
So there are 7 amazing tools to help your business get the best start! Let us know which tools you use for your business and which you couldn’t live without.
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