Are you a Small Business Owner trying to keep your head above water? Utilizing the right tools allows you to get back to doing what you love! Lucky for you, there are a multitude of tools and resources available online.
The World Wide Web is such a vast place, filled with resources that you just might not realize are out there. Some of these tools are extremely helpful and will become a life saver to a small business owner.
Time Tracking Tools – Options to track your time and work and, in some cases, invoice your clients.
- Timepost – Web integrated time managing system that allows you to plug the information into Harvest, Basecamp and Tick.
- Tick – Tick is a simple and friendly time tracking application focused on helping you hit your budgets.
- Harvest – Simple time tracking, fast online invoicing and powerful reporting software.
- Freshbooks – The fastest way to track time, organize expenses and invoice your clients.
Invoicing Tools – It is essential for a successful business to get paid. For most business this requires an invoice be sent to the client. These tools save time and, in turn, create opportunity for additional revenue.
- Freshbooks – The fastest way to track time, organize expenses and invoice your clients.
- Harvest – Simple time tracking, fast online invoicing and powerful reporting software.
- Less Accounting – Package of Financial Software with several 3rd party integration applications and thousands of domestic financial institutions.
- Quickbooks Online – Full Package of Financial Software for any Small Business.
Organization and Project Management Resources – Tools to help you organize your business, as well as your relationships with your clients and other members on your team.
- Backpack – Share information with your team. Keep your documents, discussions, and schedules in one place all the time.
- Writeboard – Sharable, web based text documents that let you save every edit and roll back to previous versions.
- GoPlan – Lets you keep track of your projects and collaborate with your colleagues securely through an intuitive user interface.
- Basecamp – Focuses on communication and collaboration for project management.
- Central Desktop – Collaboration Software, Online Project Management and Sharepoint Alternative for Business Teams.
Business Tools – Miscellaneous list of online resources to do everything you need to run a successful business.
- Highrise – CRM helps you manage your contacts, keep track of who said what when, schedule follow-ups, set reminders, and convert leads into done deals.
- Campfire – Campfire is a simple web-based real-time group chat tool for business. It makes real-time communication with 2-60 people as simple as visiting a web page.
- Google Apps – Reliable, secure web-based office tools for any size business
Powerful, intuitive applications like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs can help reduce your IT costs and help employees collaborate more effectively – all for just $50 per user per year.
- GoToMeeting – Reliable, easy, effective web conferencing and online meetings. Work with anyone , anywhere.
- Wufoo – An online HTML form builder that helps anyone create beautiful contact forms, online surveys and event registrations without writing a single line.
- Paypal – PayPal is the faster, safer way to send money, make an online payment, receive money or set up a merchant account.
- FaxZero – Free Internet Faxing – Send faxes to anywhere in the US and Canada for free.
- YouSendit – YouSendIt is the most popular and secure online file sharing software that allows you to easily send large files and email attachments. FTP Replacement resource.
- eFax – Send and receive faxes by email.
- DropBox – Dropbox is the easiest way to store, sync, and, share files online. There’s no complicated interface to learn.
- DropSend – Send large files and store files online.
Email Campaigns
- AWeber – Send email newsletters & autoresponders. Top notch email deliverability.
- Breeze – Breeze lets you create and send amazing email campaigns. Analyze and view real time reports of who is opening and clicking on your email.
- iContact – Email marketing through iContact allows your company to create, send and track your email messages with ease and efficiency.
Legal
- Copyright -US Copyright Office is an office of public record for copyright registration and deposit of copyright material.
- Creative Commons – Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators.
Web Presense
- WordPress – Blog Tool and Publishing Platform.
- Expressions Engine – Web Publishing Resource for Professionals.
- StrongSpace – Rather than writing your data to a single drive, Strongspace spreads the data across up to 45 disks significantly improving reliability.
- Google Sites -Thinking of creating a website? Google Sites is a free and easy way to create and share webpages. Learn more. Create rich web pages easily.
Advertising
- Adbrite – Webmasters can buy and sell text ads based on their site’s topic area.
- Adwords – Advertise with Google AdWords ads in the Sponsored Links section next to search results to boost website traffic and sales.
Enjoy and, I hope, profit from this wonderful list of Online Tools and Resources for Small Business Owners/Freelancers. For those of you looking for additional resources, here is a link to a list of 12 Cool Web Tools for Small Businesses.
Jodi Crosby, Smart Virtual Assistant for You, is a mom and an entrepreneur committed to working with small business owners. My goal is to enable you to accomplish your goals while leaving the administrative tasks to a professional. I understand that being in business for yourself, while very rewarding is also very challenging. Smart Virtual Assistant for You can help. Visit http://smartvaforu.com. Follow Jodi on Twitter @SmartVAforU
Great list and I know first hand how useful some of the tools are in running a day to day business. As far as the invoicing process is concerned I would nominate Curdbee, a super easy invoicing application which is free and without any restrictions on number of client, items, etc.
Also I would like to add CampaignMonitor for the list of email applications.
Just my two cents 🙂
Hi Loren! Thank you for commenting on my post and providing great suggestions for software we can use to manage our businesses.
Have a great day!
Sophie