The 11 Best Productivity Tools for Small Businesses

When it comes to managing a business, maintaining productivity is crucial. Keeping your clients happy, fostering strong communication in teams and across departments, focusing on tasks in an orderly fashion, and handling your finances is imperative. With this article, we bring to you some of the best productivity tools for small businesses. (Although even large companies can benefit from these tools.) The following tools will help you manage your tasks, find an easy-to-use platform for your finances and foreign exchange, and help you track your customer interactions. 

The 11 Best Productivity Tools for Small Businesses

Keeping your small business moving forward can be a challenge, especially if tasks keep growing into full-blown projects. Poor communication will also cost you time, money, and even clients. A successful business is build by passionate, engaged employees. Make sure your team is buying into your mission by keeping the idea flow open. Another important aspect of any business is how you handle your finances. Use a reliable platform for complex processes like foreign exchange and b2b payments. 

Below, we’ve outlined the 11 best productivity tools for small businesses in the following categories:

• Project management and collaboration
• Communication
• People management
• Finances
• Customer Relations

Project Management and Collaboration

All of your employees need a task management system to help them organize and manage tasks. You’ll also want a shared task software that everyone can use for shared tasks or projects.

Some helpful task management systems include:

• Google Docs

Google Docs and Google Sheets let you share documents and spreadsheets and collaborate with teammates in real time.

• Clickup

Clickup helps you manage and assign projects, customize your workflow, create goals, automate tasks, and more.

• AirTable

This spreadsheet-database hybrid lets you utilize pre-built apps, create automations, and edit, comment, and collaborate on projects in real time.

• Smartsheet

Smartsheet’s advanced task tracking features provide a simple solution for managing projects and teammates. What’s more, it lets you easily create and edit scalable project plans and charts.

• Highlights

Highlights was named the #1 Productivity Award by the Webby Awards in 2019. Use this tool to maximize efficiency by customizing task management features. Best of all, setup is easy, with no coding required!

Communication

Developing seamless communication is integral to any company, especially those that have remote employees or employ freelancers. It’s important to find the right tools to keep your team connected. Fortunately, we have a list of some tried and true tools to streamline your communication

• Slack

Slack is designed for companies of all sizes. If you’re a small business, it will grow with you! This cloud-based application lets you manage individuals and groups, host video or audio calls, and share files. Slack is offered for free, or you can upgrade to utilize its additional features, with plans starting at $6.67.

• Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams has all of the technology and functionality you need to operate a fully remote business or simply to communicate with departments within your office. With Microsoft Teams, you can chat individuals and groups, with the ability to create locked groups for additional security. You can also host and record video and audio calls for large groups of people. With a single mouse click, Microsoft lets you communicate your availability to the rest of your team by marking your status as ‘available,’ ‘busy,’ ‘do not disturb,’ and more.

People Management

Managing your employees effectively can be a herculean task, but using the right productivity tools makes it much simpler. The right tool should help you to:

• track payroll and W2 data
• track employment goals
• follow-up on changes in employees’ personal lives
• celebrate milestones such as birthdays and anniversaries

Your office needs to stay flexible and nimble. Engaged employees with plenty of buy-ins are your greatest asset. It’s important to maintain strong communication in your company to promote buy-in.

Some helpful people management tools are:

• Deel

Easily pay employees and keep track of employee contracts, invoices, and tax information with Deel. Deel is especially useful if your team works remotely or if you frequently work with freelancers.

• Hubstaff

If you employee contracted workers or employees who work remotely, it’s important to keep track of your team’s hours and work. Hubstaff makes a seemingly difficult task of monitoring remote employees simple. The tool keeps track of employee activity by logging hours and taking screenshots to track productivity. Hubstaff automatically generates timesheets and invoices, making payments easy. In addition to time tracking, Hubstaff lets you create to-do lists, request time off, and create a schedule.

• Primalogik

Your company’s productivity depends on your employees’ strengths and weaknesses. To evaluate those, you can use one of the best Performance Management Tools available in the market, i.e., Primalogik. It’ll help in performance tracking, review, and feedback sharing. Using this insight, you’ll be able to make the right decisions for your employees.

Finances

Set up a multi-currency money management system for cross-border payments at the start. Even if you currently aren’t selling outside your borders, every market is global. When you’re ready to expand and move into new markets, a multi-currency money management system for your foreign exchange will make it easy. The right platform for corporate money transfer helps you to seamlessly shift from local to global payments instantly. 

• Verto is a great tool to use for making b2b foreign exchange payments. Designed for freelancers and small to medium enterprises, Verto offers low rates and zero transaction fees. This multi-functional money management system lets you send and receive money, convert FX, and manage rates.

Customer Relations

Tracking customer contact is an imperative part of running a small business. Finding the right software to handle this will help you immensely. While most of your clients will have account managers connecting with them regularly, it is important to remember that administrative employees also need to check in with your clients from time to time. The right software can bring your employees up to speed quickly. Even better, the best client communication software will let you include phone messages, photos, and notes sent by the client.

People and relationships are the currency of business. When there is an incoming call from a client, the software should automatically take the receiver to the client-details page. Here it should be able to record the topic, concern, and any additional notes. The date of said call should be automatically saved as well. This will help to make the process more seamless, user-friendly, and greatly reduce the chances of error.

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• Monday.com offers a great customer relationship management program. Not only is its CRM software easy to use and simple to set up (with no coding required), but it also presents data in a clear, visually appealing format. Monday.com’s CRM platform is an invaluable tool for onboarding customers, managing sales pipelines, and monitoring leads.