As a small business owner, you’ve always got a lot on your plate. Thankfully, modern day technology can make your life as an IT entrepreneur a lot easier by automating many routine tasks like those Excel spreadsheets you’re still filling out to track your expenses.
To help you choose what’s right for your company, we’ve come up with a roundup of the best apps that will help increase your own and your team’s productivity and streamline various business processes.
Office 365
You may already be familiar with Microsoft Office 365, but still, this app suite is essential for any organization, large or small. With Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneDrive, most of your basic day-to-day business tasks are fully covered.
FixMe.IT
FixMe.IT is an easy-to-use and budget-friendly remote support app ideally suited for small IT businesses and helpdesk departments. Whether you need to access your office devices and retrieve important files when traveling or fix computer issues remotely, FixMe.IT should be your first pick. Besides that, it allows you to share your screen with multiple remote users, connect to unattended PCs or servers, host online demonstrations, and the list goes on. The remote support app is highly rated by IT pros and many others thanks to its ease of use, extensive feature set and cost-effectiveness. FixMe.IT is free to try for up to 15 days, after that you can choose to purchase a monthly ($30) or yearly ($300) subscription.
Jira Service Desk
Jira Service Desk by Atlassian is a help desk platform that empowers your team to track and manage support tickets from your customers. If you bundle it with Confluence, you can create an all-in-one help desk center providing your customers with an integrated knowledge base and easy means to submit support requests via different communication channels. Starting at just $10 per month, Jira Service Desk is one of the most budget-friendly help desk options available for a small IT business.
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Slack
With Slack, you can create and organize chats based on teams, clients, or tasks, exchange and store files, share screen with the other team members, and much more. Slack has been criticized due to its difficulty of use for beginners, however, it’s still one of the most powerful internal communications apps to date. Slack is available for free with certain feature limitations. At just $8 per month you get more features along with priority support and a larger 10GB storage for each team member.
Skype
Skype has no viable alternatives. Believe us, we’ve tried to look for one, but Skype is still irreplaceable when it comes to an all-in-one tool with voice, video communications, and quick screen sharing options. The only downside to using Skype is the inability to upload a customized voicemail message. Skype is available for free if you don’t plan on making or receiving calls from landline.
LiveChat
LiveChat is essential for instant customer support. It enables you to provide sales or product-related assistance to your customers via a customizable chat window embedded into your website. LiveChat’s Starter package, which is best suited for small businesses and startups, offers unlimited chat agents, ticketing system and basic customization options for only $16 per month if billed annually.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks provides an easy way to create and automate personalized invoices, track time spent on different projects, and manage your expenses. In addition to lots of accounting features, it also offers seamless integration with G-Suite apps, LiveChat, and many other business apps. At $25 per month, FreshBooks allows you to create unlimited and customized invoices, accept card payments and bank transfers online, automate recurring invoices, draft unlimited proposals, and much more.
QuickBooks
Although it originally emerged as a personal finance management app, now there’s also a solution for small and medium-sized businesses. QuickBooks lets you easily create invoices, accept payments, and manage payroll for $20/month. You can access your QuickBooks account from the web, as well as from your laptop, workstation, or mobile device.
Dropbox
Undoubtedly, Dropbox is the number one cloud storage platform. Dropbox Business allows you to store as much information as you need and securely share files with other people on your team for $20/month per user account.
Evernote
Evernote is the go-to app for storing your business notes and to-do lists and keeping them organized. The app is free for personal use, but also offers Premium ($7.99 per month) and Business ($14.99 per user per month) packages that deliver sharing and collaboration features.
Mindmeister
Mindmeister is a must-have if you need an easy and intuitive solution for brainstorming ideas. Its Pro tier, billed at $8.25 per user per month, lets you create numerous mind maps using custom styles or themes, share your ideas with the team, and export mind maps as Word, PowerPoint, or PDF files.
Milanote
An alternative to both Evernote and Mindmeister, Milanote allows you to create notes and to-do lists, upload images and files either from your desktop or mobile device, and organize them into boards for further collaborative editing or brainstorming. Unlike Mindmeister, Milanote allows you to export PDFs or images of your boards for free. At $9.99 per month, you can upload unlimited number of notes, images, links and files, as well as create unlimited shared boards.
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