Business Software Entrepreneurs Can’t Live Without

While it’s tempting for entrepreneurs to not invest during the bootstrapping phase when money is tight, the business software we listed below really is a need-to-have not a nice-to-have if you want to grow your business.

At some point when your business has grown substantially, you will need to hire a pro with more expertise to improve upon your DIY work. Until then, we trust these types of business software to help run a better, more streamlined business.

Accounting

You might not be able to hire an accountant just yet, but it’s essential to track your business finances from day 1. We like these accounting software tools for monitoring cash flow, invoicing, tracking sales tax, and more:

QuickBooks: This is basically the gold standard for bookkeeping. If you think you’ll need an accountant down the line, start with QuickBooks to save your future self a lot of time. Track income and expenses, organize receipts, maximize tax deductions, invoice and accept payments, track miles, manage cash flow, run general reports, send estimates, track sales and sales tax, and manage 1099 contractors.

Zoho Books: Zoho Books is accounting software that lets you invoice, calculate sales tax, and it integrates with their other business software like inventory management, CRM, email, and business automation.

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Freshbooks: Freshbooks offer lots of customized packages and the base options for freelancers are $13.50 a month for: Unlimited invoices to 5 billable clients, tracking unlimited expenses, sending unlimited estimates, getting paid with credit cards and bank transfers, tracking sales tax & see reports, and access anywhere on iOS and Android.

Project Management

What’s on your to-do list? Well, without a project management tool, your priorities (and tasks) might be all over the place. Project management software helps you meet deadlines, collaborate with others, and track employee tasks in one place. We like these low-cost project management tools:

Trello: Trello is great for businesses with teams and phase-based projects. Its tile-style system makes it easy to visualize your workflow and view task assignments, timelines, productivity metrics, calendars, and more.

Wrike: Wrike is a more list-based project management software. If you’re more task-based and need to track your deadlines in one place, this is the app for you.

Teamwork: Teamwork is designed for working with others and is our favorite project management software. We really like the time tracking feature as well as the option to add a client dashboard.

CRM

A CRM, or customer relationship management, is business software that helps you track customer data, interactions, payments, etc. Think of this as a secure, digital hub for all of your customers’ information. A CRM is critical for running digital marketing as well as running any customer retention activities like newsletters or retargeting paid social ads. Try these low-cost CRM options for your business:

Hubspot Sales Hub: HubSpot is completely scalable, so if you don’t want to change CRMs every 2 years, this is a future-proof option.

Salesforce: Salesforce claims to be the “#1 Growth Platform for Digital Sales” and we believe it. Their business software helps you see the leads in your team’s pipeline, automate tasks, and close deals more quickly.

Zoho CRM: Like Salesforce, Zoho helps your sales team automate their tasks. However, it also lets you track performance, manage your workflow, and collaborate with your team in one place. Added bonus - if you have their other business software, they connect together seamlessly.

Social Media

We love social media, but it can become a rabbit hole of distractions for busy entrepreneurs. Try these social media software options to stay social without spending hours on Instagram looking at cat memes:

Planoly: Planoly lets you plan and schedule content for Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter in one place. It even integrates with your website for social selling. If you have a social media manager, they can populate the content for you to review and approve before scheduling to go live. Win-win.

Hootsuite: Hootesuite allows you to schedule messages, add social accounts, review messages, and see all of your engagements in one dashboard. While Hootsuite is more expensive than Planoly, you can manage more accounts in one place and the reporting, word clouds, and voice of the consumer research might be worth it for the data lover.

Sprout Social: We love Sprout Social because it offers a well-rounded stack of business software. Use it for social listening; content calendars; creating and scheduling posts; profiles, keywords and locations monitoring; analytics; and follower engagement.

Canva: Now on to the content creation part of social media. Canva is a graphic design platform, used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents and other visual content. There are tons of super cool, customizable templates that are free. They do offer social media scheduling tools, fonts, and images that you have to pay for but there’s lots you can do without any payment.

Website Analytics

While there are hundreds of awesome business software solutions to monitor the effectiveness of your website, our favorite hands-down is:

Google Analytics: After setting up your account and adding the Google Analytics code to your website, you’ll have real-time access to everything going on with your website. Build your own dashboards with data on: Users, sessions, bounce rate, session duration, traffic source and medium, user retention, users by date and time, sessions by device, pageviews, and search queries brought in from Google Search Console. Oh and did we mention it’s free?! (Also don’t forget to get Google Analytics certified before jumping in so you can know what to look for and better understand your data.)

The bottom line

Your business software has a big effect on how smoothly your business runs. Use a handful of specific tools to save time and money as you scale your business. These business software categories are a great start for revamping your business and focusing on what matters most - your business growing.

Of course, if you want to save even more time, we’re here to give you a hand with your digital marketing. We help entrepreneurs and small businesses get more results from their marketing without the hassle or hours of research. Contact Thrive Marketing Consultants today for a free quote!