4 Tools Every Startup Business Should Use

What’s the most expensive endeavor in the world? Running a startup business. After hiring top talent, renting office space and taking care of utility bills, new entrepreneurs might not have much money left to spend on tools which would increase their business’s productivity and help it compete. Certain tools are more valuable than others, and if they come at an affordable or even free price, even better. Here are four affordable tools you can use to boost your business:

Trello

Don’t have enough money to hire full-time workers? One way to navigate around this situation is to hire freelancers. They provide the same quality as their full-time counterparts while costing visibly less, since you only have to pay them by the hours or project.

If you like the idea of hiring freelancers, then Trello is a must-have for your business.

Apart from being free to use, Trello is easy on the eye and simple to navigate. It lets you delegate different projects to different team members via its digital dashboard. You can provide real-time feedback on the work of the hired freelancers.

What’s more, since it has apps for Android and iOS, you don’t have to remain glued to your computer to manage Trello as you can handle it on the run. Furthermore, since it is extremely popular among freelancers, it is likely that you won’t have to train them to use this project management tool.

Grasshopper

Want your small business to deliver large-office phone functionality but without a large-scale investment? Then you cannot go wrong with this virtual phone system. And Grasshopper’s basic plan only costs $12 a month. Why Grasshopper? Apart from offering competitive pricing, Grasshopper offers a plethora of features to prove its utility for your business. Take, for instance, its ability to work in tandem with your home and mobile phones — which means you won’t have to invest in additional equipment or phones. Automated attendant is another useful feature of this software using which you can greet the clients with whatever message you want. Also, in addition to giving each employee (or department) their own extension, it offers the features like call forwarding, call screening and music-on-hold feature. It even offers a voicemail transcription feature. That means you can have your voicemail messages transcribed and have them sent to you in the form of text. It also has an online faxing feature which allows faxes to go to your email inbox in the form of PDF files.

Wave

Have you heard about a software which offers accounting services for free? Wave has become so popular that its user-base has grown from 1 million users in 2014 to over 3.5 million users today. So what is it that makes Wave appealing to its users? For starters, it is completely free without any hidden costs, which means that there are no limits on invoicing, items, contacts or other features. Its dashboard is simplistic, and you can access everything from your sales and purchases to bank accounts and invoices due on it.

Google Data Studio

Nothing baffles newbie entrepreneurs more than the need to go through analytics and come up with metrics that could help increase the productivity of their business. Fortunately, with Google Data Studio, the whole process of tracking and comparing analytics has become a whole lot easier. Apart from giving you the ability to keep a visual track of all your website’s metrics from Google Search Console, Google Analytics and even spreadsheets, it gives you the option to aggregate and combines them under a single dashboard. So you can track KPIs that support your business. Undoubtedly, its “Scorecard” feature is user favorite as it lets you translate website visits into conversions to calculate the estimated revenue. What’s more, you can use it to share data in real-time and connect effortlessly with other Google products. Provided you want to create easy-to-read reports that are easy to understand, you can do that thanks to Google Data Studio as well. There’s also the option of superimposing your business’s logo on the reports to give them a custom look.

Conclusion

In today’s day and age, tools which could increase the productivity of businesses are innumerable. On top of being free or cheap, these tools have all the features you might need to run your business in a resourceful manner. Above all, they boast the productivity of your business, increase its reputation in the eyes of clients and organize workflow. What more can you ask for?