Want to improve the potential efficiency, productivity and reach of your small business? Want to do it all for free? Then you’ll want to slurp up these 6 cool SME tools to help your small business totally rule! From cheeky free conferences to hobnobing with successful entrepreneurs, it’s all laid out platter like for you below…
Cool Accounting
Wave Accounting – Accounting has gone cloud. Wave accounting provides a nice myriad of free yet powerful accounting functionality. If you’re not quite up for stumping up the rather high fees that the other off the shelf accountancy solutions charge, Wave is a good free alternative for SMEs. Invoicing, online accounting, payroll and receipts managements – it’s got the lot. Just sign up, and away you go!
Cool Free Content Management System
The old debate on whether or not you need an online presence was really put to bed years ago. Even the most plodding, old school of businesses really need to have a staunch and neat web presence at the very least. What better way than to set up a free WordPress based content management system. There are many alternatives, such as Tumblr and Joomla but WordPress really leaves the rest far behind offering sumptuous versatility and functionality.
Accept Payments On The Go
Not only are businesses expanding their businesses online, but a greater share of that online presence now hails from mobile devices. Here’s a cool little tool that allows you to get paid via your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch no matter where you are – Square is totally free and works along the same model as Paypal – you simply pay a percentage based transaction charge from every payment you receive. Accepting payments on the go has never been quite so easy.
Cool Communications & Conferencing
Webinars and conferences can be useful ways to inform and collaborate with clients and employees alike. While there are many paid options out there, the Free Conference App turns your phone into an instant conference centre. It’s quite powerful for a freebie, even allowing users to save conference recordings in a variety of formats. For a more straightforward chat with everyone and anyone, in any location there’s the ever popular Skype. While there are more feature laden paid options available, the basic free tool should get the job done for most SME’s.
Cool Business Mentorship & Knowledge
Quora describes itself as an open source knowledge platform. However, don’t mistake it for some cheap and cheery Wiki site – there’s a business section where you can pick the brains of talented entrepreneurs and get some solid business insights and solutions for the challenges you face. What’s more, you can also don your expert hat and provide some guidance back for others too.
Cool Organization & Collaboration
You have your laptop, your desktop, your iPhone, your business computer and that iPad you got for your birthday. For business managers who have far too many devices, and will inevitably do drips of work, collate notes and jot ideas down using all of them…Evernote will be one of the slickest free tools you’ll ever use. In essence, it allows you to work from anywhere and everywhere, using any and all your devices – your notes, research and work are simply stored in the cloud, and you can log in from any device and be automatically and immediately synced.