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Running a business is extremely difficult. As an entrepreneur, you need to wear different hats to ensure your business runs smoothly. Thankfully, business tools and software can help you wear those hats better.
When it comes to doing tasks more efficiently, having the right tools can make a huge difference. Business software and tools can automate repetitive, complex, and time-consuming processes that you’d have to do manually otherwise.
If you want to know more about how to use the best business tools to your advantage, you’ve come to the right place.
What is a Business Tool?
Business management tools refer to all applications, systems, solutions, techniques, and technologies that are used to make business processes more efficient and effective. This allows brands to cope with the changing market and ensures that your company will remain in a competitive position.
Business tools also provide a good foundation for your business to implement better decisions and services to meet all your existing goals, satisfy your customer needs, and make more profit.
Related: Best AI Tools for Business
Types of Small Business Tools & Software
Before you dive into different tools for your business, you first need to identify the types of software needed by your company.
Depending on your business size and industry, choosing tools should be dictated by how your operation works.
For example, if you have thousands of customers, you need to capitalize on Customer Relationship Management Software.
If you have a remote team, a Communication And Collaboration Software is a must have.
Here are a few business tool types that may be beneficial for your business operation.
Marketing Tools
Marketing business tools help in creating an effective marketing strategy by helping you measure success and identify opportunities.
These tools can be used to track everything from website visits to sales leads. They help track and analyze your performance, identify opportunities, and measure results.
Documentation Tools
Documentation business tools help in creating and maintaining content that can be shared easily among team members.
You can use them to create business documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more. These tools make it easy to collaborate on projects and share information quickly.
Accounting & Finance Tools
As one of the most important parts of your business, having accounting and finance software is integral.
Various types of software cater to different needs such as cash flow monitoring, tax filing, and many more.
Keeping your books up to date and accurate through reliable software is a must whatever industry you belong to.
Sales & Invoicing Tools
Invoicing is one of the major headaches of business owners. Creating it, sending it out, and following up on it can take up a huge chunk of time.
With the help of a solid software, you can manage this process more effectively and save money.
Organizing and automating these processes will also ensure consistent and timely payment collection, as well as fewer errors caused by manual data entry.
Communication & Collaboration Tools
Whether you have a remote team or not, it’s vital to collaborate and communicate. If you don’t have the right tools to facilitate these tasks, your business will suffer.
Communication & Collaboration tools and software focus on organizing, accessing, using, and sharing content. It also makes managing content easier whether it’s digital media, images, forms, or other documents.
Project & Task Management Tools
Each project in your company is made up of different tasks, and managing these is important if you want to beat the deadline and ensure great results.
However, asking your employees to make manual to-do lists is not enough. Project & Task Management Software enables you to track progress from beginning to end, delegate tasks and subtasks to team members, and set deadlines in just one click.
Productivity Tools
When it comes to becoming more efficient at work, your team members need to work smarter, not harder. One way to enable them to be more productive is to use Productivity Software.
This tool can either produce presentations, graphs, databases, and other types of documents. Depending on its focus, Productivity tools can also help you manage your e-mail, take notes, or avoid distractions.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools
The foundation of every business is its customers. If you want to build brand trust, you need to nurture your relationship with them.
A Customer Relationship Management Software will enable you to do just that by helping you offer a more seamless experience to customers based on interactions, personality, and many more.
Ultimately, its goal is to help you increase your sales and revenue.
Website & Content Creation
When it comes to today’s digital age, customers expect you to have an easy-to-navigate website, as well as post educational or relatable content regularly.
However, doing all these things can be expensive and time-consuming.
Having a Website & Content Creation Software will help you speed up steps in establishing your digital presence such as content research and planning, as well as gain insight into your content.
Best Free & Paid Business Tools for Filipino Entrepreneurs
Based on the types of business tools mentioned above, you probably have an idea of what software you need for your company.
To help you choose, we’ve compiled the most reliable business software that will help you drive performance and efficiency.
Marketing Business Tools
If you want to get more sales, you should prioritize email marketing. This is important considering it offers a higher Return on Investment compared to other marketing activities.
MailChimp offers features such as personalization and segmentation, landing page building, predictive insights, and CRM tools, among many others. It is free if you have less than 2,000 subscribers.
Jotform enables you to get the answers you need quickly and easily. It offers 800+ survey templates along with drag-and-drop customization so that you can create the survey that fits your needs perfectly.
You just add your own questions to create engaging surveys and share them online to collect responses instantly. It also allows you to track and analyze your survey data.
Want to ace your marketing game? Convertkit is perfect for you.
It allows you to grow your audience more by creating sign-up forms, landing pages, and link pages that stand out. It also helps you build a community through intuitive sales funnels and other visual automations.
Therefore, you can save time on email marketing, and focus more on creating.
This internet-based app will help you manage your social media content, as well as share posts across various social media websites.
Therefore, you can spread out your content in a more convenient way. The app can also connect to various platforms and make it easy for you to create and schedule posts.
This app has a free version to help you manage up to 3 channels and enjoy basic publishing tools.
Known as the easiest design tool for businesses, Canva allows you to make beautiful content even if you haven’t had any graphic design experience.
When you access this one-stop destination, you can get inspired and have the tools to design and create anything for your brand. Making engaging content will help you attract new prospects both online and offline.
While there is a free version, Canva Pro is recommended if you have a team.
Social media platforms have made it easier for businesses to target customers. Facebook Ads can be used to target your customers based on their demographic, location, and profile information.
When you create an ad, you need to set a budget and bid for the clicks and impressions your ad will receive. After this, users can see your ad on Facebook and/or Instagram.
This is a cloud-based survey tool that enables you to create, send, and assess surveys easily.
This can be beneficial for companies that want to know what their customer satisfaction level is, or get feedback on their services and products. It can also be used internally if you want to examine employee satisfaction.
Having a presence online is not enough. You also need to examine your performance and solve gaps if you want to be the best.
Google Analytics is used to track your website performance and collect insight from your visitors. This can help you analyze customer behavior and use it for your marketing campaigns.
HubSpot is one of the most popular CRM, sales, marketing, and customer service software for businesses. One of its claims to fame is that it is very easy to learn even for entrepreneurs who are not tech-savvy.
It also has a bunch of business tools and built-in templates to help you grow your business.
This all-in-one social media marketing platform is a must for social media managers.
This allows you to curate great content, schedule posts, plan future campaigns, manage channels, measure ROI, and manage team members.
Although Later started as an Instagram scheduler in 2014, it has transformed into one of the best visual marketing platforms for social media networks such as Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and many more.
This allows you to do visual scheduling, and media management. Its features also touch on analytics and marketing.
Crowdfire claims to simplify social media management, and it does its job well. It allows social media managers to discover and schedule future content, as well as manage all channels in one place.
In many ways, this marketing sidekick can help you grow your online presence.
Another content marketing platform you should consider is CoSchedule. Whether you work with a team or not, this tool helps you with a lot of tasks such as blog posts, email campaigns, and social media publishing.
This way, you can plan, organize, and execute your content marketing strategy. CoSchedule uses a drag-and-drop interface that makes it convenient to schedule and collaborate projects in just one platform.
Documentation Business Tools
This is a free web-based application where spreadsheets and documents are created, edited, and stored online.
When you use Google Docs, it’s easy to import, create, and update documents in different file formats.
Another free web-based application provided by Google within its Google Drive offer is Google Sheets, which is a service that hosts documents, slides, and forms.
Users can easily edit, analyze, and organize information here.
Microsoft Office 365 is a robust desktop app that you’re most likely familiar with. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and many more.
You can also get online storage and enjoy cloud-connected features that foster real-time collaboration.
This is a fast and reliable way to sign agreements and documents electronically from any device wherever you are in the world.
With this tool, you can easily go paperless.
This tool gives you a dashboard where you can track signature request progress, as well as send reminders to different signees, and view signed documents.
It also offers branding customization.
This cloud-based storage solution allows you to easily save files online so you can access them anywhere from any device.
You can also use Google Drive if you want other people on your team to collaborate or edit any of your files.
Another popular cloud-storage system you can use is DropBox. This allows you to save files online and sync them to your device.
You can also share your files and folders with other people without having to send a huge attachment or file.
This app allows you to store files you may easily lose track of such as receipts, things you want to read, notes, boarding passes, and many more.
It easily keeps everything in sync between all your devices.
Nobody likes reading posts with wrong grammar. If you post something that is not written well, your customer’s brand trust will be affected.
Thankfully, Grammarly can help you write more clearly and effectively. This way, you can finally get rid of typos and errors especially if you’re typing a caption, blog post, or email.
Accounting & Finance Business Tools
This full-feature business and financial management suite can help you with accounting, tax filing, inventory, bank account tracking and reconciliation, expense management, payment processing, and many more.
This is a cloud-based accounting program that is perfect for small business owners that need help with accounting, payroll, managing invoicing, and recurring billing.
It also offers extensive third-party app integrations and has reliable customer support.
Great for small and medium-sized businesses, Xero can give you an accurate representation of your financial position.
This web-based solution can be accessed from any device as long as you have internet.
This double-entry accounting website is perfect not only for business owners but also for freelancers. It can help you streamline your bookkeeping processes and its services include billing, payment tracking, finance management, invoicing, credit card processing, among many others.
It is free to use unless you want to avail payroll or customer payments.
This is the premier online tax filing platform in the Philippines that could be used by self-employed professionals, small business owners, and freelancers.
Most of its features include multiple payment channels so you don’t have to line up in banks, and auto-generated tax forms to help you save time.
Juan Tax is the first end-to-end tax filing platform that was accredited by BIR. It allows you to generate, file, and pay your taxes online.
By automating tax preparation, financial reports, and books of account, you can save time and decrease the likelihood of errors.
Sales & Invoicing Business Tools
This is a useful time-tracking software that lets freelancers and business owners know how much time they worked on a project for a certain client.
This convenient and accurate tracking is useful in billing, productivity, and compliance.
This is a free cross-platform web-based bookkeeping tool that can help you with invoicing, expense tracking, and basic reports, among many others.
It also has excellent features that rival paid accounting services.
Communication & Collaboration Business Tools
With this tool, enterprise-grade video conferencing can be accessible for everyone in your team.
Anyone with a Google account can use this to meet up with up to 100 participants for 60 minutes per meeting.
This messaging app is used by businesses that want to connect team members to information they need.
By bringing everyone together into one unified team, communication can be more effective and engaging.
This is a solid team collaboration and messaging app that allows everyone in your team to coordinate and work in just one place.
Here, you can easily discuss and share ideas and information, as well as manage tasks, and track progress.
This collaboration software allows you to host a meeting or share your screen with people.
To host a meeting, users need to download and install the software first. Its recording capabilities, the ability to switch presenters, and its meeting scheduler are only available for the paid version.
This is a great collaboration app that does best in creating a hybrid work environment so everyone in your business can stay informed and connected.
It offers document storage, chat functions, online meetings, audio conferencing, and many more.
Team Viewer is a remote access, control, and support solution that works with any mobile platform and desktop. It lets you remote into the devices of workers wherever you are.
It’s great if you want to access work computers in offsite locations or if your employee is working from home or traveling.
Gmail is a free email service by Google where you can send and receive emails, as well as create an address book, block people, and do other basic email tasks.
It is integral for businesses that want to connect with their customers through email.
Project & Task Management Business Tools
Asana is a web and mobile app that allows you to keep your project organized and stay on track with your goals so you can hit deadlines better.
You can leverage features such as seeing project progress, integrating it with other tools, tracking individual tasks, planning sprints, and many more.
This web-based collaboration tool is a favorite among business owners who want to organize tasks into boards.
In a short glance, you can immediately see ongoing projects, the people assigned to them, as well as their progress.
This online collaboration app can be used by teams that want to enjoy better organization. Here, you can manage your team better and have a place where you can communicate with each other.
It also keeps track of deadlines, tasks, announcements, discussions, and files that are related to work.
If you are looking for a tool where you can schedule meetings more efficiently in a professional manner, Calendy is for you.
This hub will allow you to eliminate back and forth emails with your team.
This is a web-based scheduling tool that helps you get rid of the hassle of organizing meetings through your phone or email.
All you need to do is set up the details of the meeting, and invite others through email.
Productivity Business Tools
Time Doctor will enable you to increase your productivity by giving insight into how your time is spent while using your desktop by tracking time.
Based on how you configure your account, you can track the time you spend on different tasks and projects.
This is a reliable automatic productivity and time tracker that allows you to understand and control the time that you spend on your device.
Through this, you can get an insight into how you spend your day. Therefore, you can transform your negative habits and avoid distractions.
Toggl Track is a time-tracking app that keeps track of daily activities on various platforms.
This will allow you to see where you spend time so you can optimize your workflow and identify areas that need improvement.
Timely can be your go-to app if you want to track time across teams and various projects.
This automatic time tracking software can help you stay connected with your employees and report accurately on billing, project management, resource planning, and many more.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Business Tools
Whether it’s managing, monitoring, or tracking your workload, Monday is a great tool for managing projects and teamwork. Its features allow for improved collaboration, communication, and data visualization.
It also has a very intuitive interface especially when it comes to automating repetitive work such as sales pipelines, contact and lead management, and lead capturing, among many others.
This web-based online office suite offers spreadsheets, presentations, note-taking, word processing, web conferencing, and CRM capabilities, among many others.
Zoho CRM is a single repository where you can bring your marketing, sales, and customer service support activities to streamline your processes.
This tool solves tons of challenges that are faced by growing businesses.
You can use it across your sales, customer service, and marketing teams not only because it over-delivers on its free version, but also because it allows companies to mix and match solutions to scale their CRM system.
This powerful tool is designed with customer satisfaction and relationship in mind. The Zendesk cloud-based CRM platform allows you to access information across your entire team anytime and anywhere.
It also offers features like creating personal ticket views, managing and working on support tickets, and converting different requests into tickets, among many others.
Website & Content Creation Business Tools
WordPress is a flexible and solute platform that is easy to use even for small brand owners who have not had experience in creating a website.
This tool comes with a simple dashboard, and other menu options that will allow you to create pages, posts, customize web design, and more.
Shopify is one of the most popular commerce platforms in the world. It will enable you to grow and manage your business in just one platform.
This subscription-based software makes it easy for business owners to set up their online store, as well as sell in physical locations using the Shopify point-of-sale app.
GoDaddy is one of the most popular domain and hosting companies today. It can help you host your website, as well as take care of your online needs, including email.
Its e-Commerce feature is extremely useful for small businesses who want to run an online store.
Siteground is another hosting company that is known for its fast hosting plan, and great customer support.
Aside from domain registration, it also provides shared hosting, enterprise solutions, email hosting, and cloud hosting.
If you are looking for another option for hosting, take a look at Blue Host. It is one of the world’s largest providers of affordable yet reliable hosting.
It has a special focus on digital marketing and small businesses so you can easily avail of services that can help you get started with your online shop.
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