Running a small business is no easy task. From personal experience there is a lot that happens behind the scenes for things to run smoothly that are often less than glamorous! We wanted to share a few business tools that help make our lives easier.
17 Hats – Invoicing & Lead Management
One of my least favorite tasks is billing. Honestly. We’ve used several invoicing tools in the past and have fallen in love with 17 Hats. What I love most about it is the ability to manage invoices, accept online payment, and manage clients. Admittedly, we aren’t using 17 Hats for all that it can do. It has the ability to work as a project management program (if you are a one-person-shop), manage contracts, workflows, even your calendar! It’s a relatively new software and I’m excited to see how they grow and what tools become available next.
Slack – Team Communication
All of us at Eviva Media are remote – that means we are rarely (almost never?) in the same room. How do we keep things running so smoothly? Slack. This program allows us to keep our inboxes free of inter-team communication and segment conversations by client, project, or however we need to keep ourselves organize. Did I mention it’s free? There are paid options too if you need more then what that basic tier allows, but we haven’t even had to consider it.
Expensify – Tracking expenses (including mileage!)
I already mentioned how much I dislike billing, tracking expenses is right up there with it! Before I found Expensify, I was always forgetting my notebook to track mileage or keeping boxes of receipts that I swore I’d go through eventually. Well now with Expensify I can auto-magically pull in expenses and (my favorite) record my mileage right on my phone! No excuses there. Even if I remember the next day I can quickly look up the distance and add it in there. Easy-peasy.
Google Apps – Email, Cloud Storage, Calendar
For only $5 per user per month, we have full access to the Google Apps Suite. This is what we use for email, cloud storage, calendar, and other cool tools. Again, being a remote team, this allows us to easily share large files and collaborate on spreadsheets and presentations.
Asana – Project Management Software
Keeping track of clients, projects, time-spent-on-projects, can be a bit of a headache. There are also TONS of options out there for project management software – many can get quite pricey. After a lot of research by our team, we settled on Asana to meet our current needs. Best news? For teams under 15 users it’s FREE!
