Did you know that 63% businesses spend nearly quarter of their budget on technology? Technology has a huge role in the business world. Many businesses couldn’t exist without technology. According to some stats, 43% businesses use technology to automate processes. Like it or not, technology and business cannot go their separate ways. Since technology is changing and improving every year, business should also keep up with the latest tech trends.
There are a lot of different ways to rely on technology in business, and with new trends arising every day, there will be much to learn and adopt in your business. Given that you cannot keep in mind all these tech tricks, we compiled a list of five tech tips that can help you manage your small business.
1. Remote Collaboration with your Workers
Many companies have offices around the world and if you are one of them, you know how hard it is to track your workers’ progress remotely. Thanks to Google Drive, Trello and other collaboration tools, you can work together in the same document wherever you are. Not only can you manage all the work done by others, but you can also leave comments and feedback directly in the document. Such collaboration and cloud storage tools save much time and give you insight into every project and task.
Phone calls and Skype are not enough, especially when you need to go through a document together with your coworkers and decide upon certain questions. Working in the cloud in the shared documents is also convenient when multiple people are in charge of one thing. For instance, you have customer support agents or sales people around the world working in different time zones. If they need to use the same document to enter clients’ data, it would be a mess if one worker should send to another the document, every time after shift is over. Not to mention that computers can have different versions of operating systems and if you use offline file applications, data might not be presented equally.
2. Better email management
Even though document storage and collaboration tools give you an ability to leave comments to your clients or coworkers, and there are numerous ways to reach them out, emails are still a must. Emails are especially useful in business communication with the clients and potential clients. Thanks to email management tools such as Unroll.me, FollowUpThen you can keep track of your emails, get rid of unwanted emails, and get reminded about some important emails to follow up on.
Statistics shows that 44% of small businesses use email to track and store clients’ information. That being said, it is important to keep your inbox neat and organized, especially because it happens that more than one person uses the same email for communication with the client. If multiple people manage one email address at different time, you need to organize your email communications in a way everyone can catch up where the previous person has left off.
3. Tech Tools for Business Meetings
Meetings are a necessary evil of every business. Sometimes they can be rather dreadful, boring or simply tiring but at the same time, great ideas and decisions may come up during meetings. Meetings with the clients are also important, because they can be an entrance card to closing a deal.
Technology found its place in the meetings area as well. With right tools you can better organize your meetings, spend less time preparing a presentation, sending invitations and keeping notes. For instance, tools such as PDF to PPT converter can help you reuse old presentations, by converting old PDF slides back to PowerPoint and making necessary changes. In addition to it, MeetingPad is great for writing minutes, making a seating plan and attendees management.
4. Help with Business Graphics
Every business needs images, a lot of images. You need brochures, business cards, leaflets, images for the website, the company blog, images for social media. All in all, you need to create tons of graphic. If your business is small and with limited budget, you can’t always afford hiring designers but you can always use different tools that will help you create banners, mockups for the website, and all kind of promotional photos.
There is a variety of such tools on the market and each tool has a different purpose. For instance, you can use Canva to create images for the blog, and many of them offer templates that can help you make an image even though you are not a designer yourself. Then, you can find templates for banners and use them for Google ads, or when you have a discount promotion.
5. Keep Track of Your Finances
If you run a small business, you know how tiresome it is to manage your finances. You need to manage your expenses, payrolls, revenues. There are a lot of bills to pay and with so many things going on, you cannot remember all these duties. Thanks to accounting, bookkeeping and similar finance tools you can do the job much quicker. Even if you are not a finance expert, you can find a way to cope with your small business finances and take care of your workers finances as well.
Expensify is a great tool for tracking expenses, Quickbooks can be used for quick payment processes, Xero is well known for inventory tracking and efficient invoicing. In the sea of great tools for small business finance management, you can surely find the ones that will help you finish your duties on time and without stress.
These are just five ways how you can utilize technology to run your small business, organize your workers and have better collaboration with them. What are your ways? Share your thoughts with us in comments!
Now it is left to see how technology will keep growing and helping people overcome common obstacles that arise in everyday business world.