Whether you’re trying to run a multi-million-dollar company or assemble a couch, it’ll go a lot easier if you have the right tools.
Many amazing tools could cut the time that it takes you to complete some tasks, minimize the likelihood of error, or provide a massive quality of life improvement. Here are the top five types of software for business that will help your company’s growth.
- Accounting Software
Accounting software can help you drastically increase your financial efficiency. Whether handling your finances or outsourcing to an accountant, accounting software makes your job much easier.
First of all, this software is usually cloud-based. This means that you and your accountant can access it in real time. This helps with transparency and data entry, making collaboration incredible.
It’s also important to mention that accounting software helps with financial reporting. All your reports will be the same, and you can produce them all in seconds. Also, you’ll keep them all in the same place, and you’ll be able to deliver them on demand.
One of the biggest advantages of all these features is their incredibly scalable. They save time and labor while you’re a small enterprise, but they also do this when your business scales up.
Most importantly, you’ll be assured knowing you’ve done everything by the books regarding compliance and tax management. This is important for any size the enterprise.
The more work hours you eliminate, the more time you’ll have to dedicate to core tasks. These are usually the main money-making tasks that can make or break your enterprise.
- Project Management
The next thing you need to consider is the importance of the right project management tool.
You’ll have one digital space to assign tasks, make schedules, and share documents with your team. This is especially important if you’re trying to organize a project fairly. With a project management tool, the emphasis will always be on transparency. Everyone on the project can access this file and see their tasks and coworkers’ work.
Some platforms can allow you to manage several projects/cards simultaneously. This way, you can assign access on a need-to-know basis which can elevate the security of the project. Through these means, you can keep security at an all-time high while not slowing down the work process.
According to Price’s law, only a square root of your employees does half of the work in any project. With a project management system, figuring this out will be much easier. This will incentivize your team to try harder and ensure that you easily identify the slackers and hard workers. In the long run, this can have a revolutionary effect on your company’s evaluation process.
- CRM
It’s all about the customer, so you must get the right CRM immediately.
First, CRM will collect all the customer data and allow you to make better (more personalized) approaches in the future. It will also prove invaluable in the field of analysis and insight gathering. You want to keep all your customer data centralized, and a CRM will make this much easier.
In general, sales (and lead management, in general) are the key components of your enterprise’s revenue growth. With a good CRM, you can track your customer’s progress on the customer lifecycle, make better up-sales and cross-selling instances, and run a more efficient post-sale follow-up campaign.
Speaking of campaigns, CRM can be indispensable for your marketing. By understanding your audience better, you can craft more efficient messages and even target recipients of these messages more accurately.
Same as with other platforms, it’s a scalable method. While you have a few customers, it may seem like you could do without it. Once your workload increases, the amount of work grows exponentially. This is why the sooner you install the CRM, the better.
- Content Management Software
Content comes in many shapes and forms. The only way to keep everything organized, get any file you need on demand, and spend as little time doing all this is to get the right enterprise content management.
An enterprise creates much content and spends hours upon hours editing it. You need to streamline this content creation in the most efficient way possible, and getting the right CMS is the way to do this.
Now, there are many amazing options, and finding the right platform for you may be hard. Ideally, you would make a shortlist and a quick comparison to see how their features fare against those of a competing platform. For instance, you could make an M-Files vs SharePoint comparison.
A regular CMS may not be enough if you work with a combination of structured and unstructured data. Instead, you’ll need a great IIMS (intelligent information management system). This way, you’ll be able to handle content in different formats without too much trouble.
- Time tracking
You would be surprised to learn how much time you spend on menial tasks, scrolling social media, and idling behind the screen. With a time-tracking tool, you can do just that.
Now, some enterprises use employee monitoring platforms to better understand what their employees are doing. The problem is that this doesn’t allow them to track efficiency or productivity. This only allows them to see how much time they spend pretending to work or acting like they’re working.
One of the greatest concepts in the field of productivity is interval working. Here, you have more frequent mini breaks, which (on paper) makes it seem like you’re working less. In reality, you have more active work.
Time-tracking tools are also important for the betterment of work-life balance. Burnout is the last thing you need, and you don’t want to have anyone skipping breaks.
Wrap up
At the end of the day, these tools make your work easier and more efficient. They help you with tasks ranging from accounting and content management all the way to handling large projects. On an individual level, the right time-tracking app can make productivity skyrocket. Finally, you must do all you can when it comes to customer management.
