The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted business as usual, around the globe. Many small businesses may have to drastically change their day-to-day operations. To help those businesses adjust, we came up with a list of 9 FREE and EASY tools that SMEs and Small Businesses should begin using today and adopt for the long-term.
Here’s a roundup of some of the platforms that can help organizations stay afloat during the outbreak.
Accounting
Wave
With Wave, you can truly understand and manage your income and expenses for your business. This online accounting software allows you to track everything and connect to other Wave products such as payroll, payments and invoicing. Everything is automated and in one perfect package, just for you.
Other Key Features:
- Create professional invoices for free, with advanced features like recurring billing and automatic payments.
- Payment solutions for your business – Get paid in as fast as 2 business days, enhance your brand and look more professional when you enable Payments by Wave.
Akaunting
Akaunting is an online accounting software for businesses. It has all the tools you need to manage your money online – from invoicing to expense tracking to accounting. The best part about this tool is that you can use it for free!
Key features:
- Cash Flow – Stay on top of your cashflow and make smarter decisions
- Easy Invoicing – Amaze your clients with professional looking invoices and get paid faster.
- Expense Tracking – Keep track of your mounting bills & expenses and the money flowing out.
- Powerful Reporting – See the financial health of your business, in the form of all encompassing reports
- Transaction Categories – Create categories for incomes, expenses and items and see the flow at a glance.
- Client Portal – Share the transactions and invoices with your clients and accept bulk payments.
Invoice
Xero
Many smaller businesses aim to have an on-the-go, easy to access and store type of accounting system for convenience. Xero is just like that – it is a cloud-based accounting software that connects people with the right numbers anytime, anywhere, on any device. With over 2 million subscribers worldwide, Xero has helped businesses transform the way they do business. Xero’s secure software lets you work from anywhere, share with your employees and collaborate with your advisors. Just add apps to create a complete solution for your business. Xero small business accounting software has all you need to manage your numbers effortlessly.
Xero is Peppol-ready online accounting software.
- Xero connects to the Peppol E-invoicing network launched by the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore to speed up your invoicing process.
- Can get you paid faster by your customers and help you maintain healthy cash flow in your business.
Key Features:
- Keep accurate records – Quickly categories bank transactions as they flow into Xero each day so you can track cash flow and have everything ready at tax time.
- Keep watch on business health – See the money coming in and going out on a daily basis wherever you are, with easy-to-read charts showing up-to-date figures.
- Get paid faster – Reduce the time to get paid with online invoices that include a pay now button; and let Xero chase outstanding payments with automated reminders.
Freshbooks
With Freshbooks’ cloud accounting online software, you can look forward to a much more simplified process of small business invoicing and billing!
Key Features:
- Create professional-looking invoices in seconds
- Put your business on auto-pilot – ability to send reminders, charge your client’s cards, automate your business
- Get paid upfront with deposits
- Bill for exactly what you’re worth – easily add your tracked time and expenses to your invoices
- Establish stable cashflow with retainers
Employee Productivity and Communication
Zoom
Zoom could help your business bring your team together in a frictionless environment to get much more done! Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat and webinars across mobile devices, desktops, telephones and room systems.
Key Features:
- Simplifies video conferencing and messaging across any device
- Unparalleled usability – Enable quick adoption with meeting capabilities that make it easy to start, join and collaborate across any device.
- Join anywhere, on any device – Zoom Meetings syncs with your calendar system and delivers streamlined enterprise-grade video conferencing from desktop and mobile.
- Video for every need – Enable internal and external communications, all-hands meetings and trainings through one communications platform.
Google Hangouts
Would you like to “ hang out” with your team members, anytime, anywhere? Google hangouts is made just for you! Google hangouts hosts video meetings for your business, and allows you to connect with your team from anywhere. With easy-to-join video calls, you can meet face to face without the added cost of travel.
Key Features:
- Enjoy frictionless meetings
- Designed for every kind of business – Meet is fully integrated with G Suite, so you can join meetings directly from a calendar event or email invite.
- Join meetings on the go – Meet’s specially designed iOS and Andriod apps allows you to see your meetings for the day with all important information from Calendar, then join with a tap.
- Works with other meeting solutions too.
Oodoo
With Odoo, there is no more pain in business integration. Between the Odoo apps and the many other community apps out there, Odoo provides something that can help address all of your business needs in a single, cost-effective and modular solution whereby no more work is needed to get different software cooperating.
Odoo apps are perfectly integrated with each other, and it allows you to easily fully automate your business process and reap the savings and benefits.
Key Features:
- Boost sales
- Integrate services
- Streamline operations
- Build stunning websites
- Manage finances
- Grow marketing reach
- Customise and Develop
Marketing
Hubspot
Managing Customer Relationships has gotten a lot easier with Hubspot! Hubspot is a marketing, sales and service software that helps your business grow without compromise. It helps with sales tracking, information organisation and searchable data storage. Hubspot has everything you need to organise, track and build better relationships with leads and customers. The best part of it is that its free. Yes, it’s 100% free. Forever.
Key Features:
- Marketing Hub
- Software to help you grow traffic, convert more visitors, run complete inbound marketing campaigns at scale. Provides lead generation, marketing automation, analytics tools.
- Sales Hub
- Time-saving software that helps you get deeper insights into prospects, automate the tasks you hate and close more deals faster. Provides email tracking, meeting scheduling, email automation tools
- Service Hub
- Customer service software to help you connect with customers, exceed expectations and turn them into promoters that grow your business. Provides tickets, customer feedback and knowledgebase tools.
SKALE
Last but not least, SKALE is an All-in-One Retail Marketing Platform built for SMEs and Small Business Owners. In just 4 simple steps, 60 seconds, you can create and run effective Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads that are seamlessly integrated with your business’ goals.
- SKALE is built for any business that requires digital marketing (Online, Offline or Omni-Channel)
- Small Businesses or SMEs do not require a fixed budget to begin using SKALE, as it operates on a “pay as you go” model. Over 10,000 SMEs use SKALE to grow their businesses on a daily basis
Key Features
- Automate Digital Marketing Campaigns Across Facebook, Google, Instagram in just 1 minute
- No minimum budget/ ad spend
- Create Digital Vouchers to Collect Customer Details
- In-built CRM
- Send Personalised SMS & Emails
- Track real-time ROI from marketing campaigns