Productivity Apps to Bring to Your Business
Every business owner strives to increase productivity. It’s an ideal way to cut costs and raise profits, without completely upending day-to-day operations. Organization is key to success, but sometimes that task can fall to the wayside when you’re busy running a company. There are a ton of productivity apps out there today—some free, some pricey—and it can be an overwhelming task to weed through them all. Today, we’re giving the low-down on 3 apps you might want to consider bringing into your small business.
Trello
Labeled on its website as a “productivity powerhouse,” Trello allows users to create plans, collaborate, organize workflows, and track progress in a way that’s visually pleasing and easy to follow. It utilizes a Kanban method to manage work. Simply create a board for each step of your workflow—from “To do” to “In progress” to “Complete,” and drag-and-drop cards (or “tasks”) from one board to another as a cool way to track progress. It’s a colorful way for visual doers to track meetings, onboard new employees, manage projects and tasks, and much more. The Timeline gives a quick look at what’s coming down the line, so you can determine if there are any roadblocks standing in the way of progress. If folks are overloaded with work, Timeline also makes it easy to reassign tasks, people, and dates. There are free, standard, premium, or enterprise pricing models based on the number of users who need a seat at the Trello table.
monday.com
This productivity app gives teams a variety of options to “view, analyze, organize and execute” projects in a way that makes sense for their personal preferences. Interestingly, monday.com is not only a project management tool—it’s also a great customer relationship management (CRM) tool that combines your smallest tasks, largest projects, and customer information in one area. Users can customize their own dashboards, create roadmaps, manage everyone’s workload, and automate tasks.
With monday.com, users can also import Trello boards and integrate their favorite email, instant messaging, and spreadsheet apps for effortless organization. There are free, basic, standard, or pro pricing options ranging in price from $8 to $16 a seat (billed annually).
Basecamp
Basecamp’s “all-in-one” project management app “works because it’s the easiest place for everyone in every role to put the stuff, work on the stuff, discuss the stuff, decide on the stuff, and deliver the stuff that makes up every project.” What sets it apart from other platforms is its simplicity: everyone, whether they’re remote or in the office, can work together in one central area—no more various apps to toggle between. Basecamp lets users manage their projects, teams, and business-wide announcements. Projects have different sections that feature process powerhouses, like to-do lists, message boards, schedules, file repositories, and general team chats. With all these tremendous features, the pricing model can bring a bit of sticker shock as compared to our other productivity apps: Cost ranges from $99/month to $199/month.
Interested in more tips and tricks? Head over to the Financial Pantry, ARF Financial’s informative blog covering all things small business. We keep ourselves at the forefront of the latest trends and news, so you can focus on the most important task of all: growing your business.