5 Essential Tools Every Small Business Should Invest In

When you run a small business, it can be an expensive endeavor. Some business owners have the funding to take risks, but most need to carefully review every critical decision in order to make the best choices for the company. Every small business needs tools and software to enhance its operating capabilities and scale up, but finding the ones that are suitable for your company can be difficult with so much choice available. We've created a list of must-have tools and software in our guide that every small business should invest in to streamline their processes, increase their profits and scale up the company.

When it comes to a small business, success is all about the numbers; for example, how much traffic does your website get? Where does the website traffic come from? What are the demographics of your target audience? These questions are a significant factor and play a prominent role in the success of your business, but tracking them can be challenging. Using website analytics will give you access to the answers to all of these questions and more. View the figures for your country, state, or even city, and look into the percentages that show what the differences are in driving website traffic. Most analytic tools have clear and easy-to-use charts or graphs that allow even the least tech-savvy business owner to feel confident when using the tool and make understanding the information a breeze.

Whether you take payments online or in-store, it's vital that your business can accept credit and debit card processing. Many small businesses lose money in the early days due to customers not have the cash available for the transaction and preferring to use their card to pay. For some companies, taking credit card payments can be off-putting as there is usually a charge to the business when a customer uses their credit cards. However, with Nadapayment, you will receive 100% of the transaction without having to worry about any hidden costs for small business credit card processing.

If you're filing cabinets are starting to overflow, and the loose documents keep mounting up, using an e-sign program could be the eco-friendly solution your business needs. Upload your documents onto the e-sign program before sending them to all the parties that need to sign them. E-sign programs make signing contracts, legal documents, and other agreements a hassle-free experience with no scanner or printer necessary. Many e-sign programs only need you to type your name and initials to create the signature, some let you chose from handwritten options, and some allow you to draw your own signature. Once you and all parties are required to sign documents online through an e-sign program, many will save your document on their servers for you to reference when needed. E-sign programs will save your business hundreds of dollars on printer ink, scanning, and paper, as well as saving you time and work.

As a small business owner, you may find yourself toting around bags full of hard drives and pen drives to every meeting because each one contains different documents that you will need throughout the day. However, using a cloud storage program will create a virtual link between all your devices which will allow you to access all of your documents wherever you are. When utilizing cloud storage, all users can save images, documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and videos to be accessed from anywhere in the world; this means that you no longer need to worry about losing any documents or struggle to send files that are too large. OneDrive, Sharepoint, and Dynamics 365 are common solutions for cloud storage, but if you’re looking for an alternative to asset management for Microsoft, consider Brandfolder. With cloud storage, you can maintain the same level of organization as you do with your desktop folders, as you are able to create personalized folders and save work accordingly. Finally, you can easily share any file from the cloud storage to an outside user without them having access to anything else.

When you start a business, it typically involves hiring a team of staff for projects and day-to-day tasks. However, many new companies don't have the budget to hire full-time start while they're still trying to get off the ground, and some smaller businesses need more staff but aren't large enough to stretch the budget to hire more teams. As project deadlines loom, hiring freelance or per-project staff can be highly beneficial for every small business. There are many online platforms available to help you get in touch with talented freelancers that you can hire on a short-term basis to help get projects finished off. Many of these platforms handle the payment process in their apps, so you don't need to worry about invoices when the job you hired the freelancer for is finished. This means they are automatically paid upon completion, and you can get on with more important tasks within your business.