Starting a business is an exciting adventure. However, with the advent of smartphones, it has become much easier to start a business. In this article, we will show you the best apps for starting a business.
Small Business Apps
Why Use Business Apps?
Business apps can help business owners with a variety of tasks, including finance management, scheduling, and communication. Using these tools can also help increase productivity and organization — making your business run smoother and more efficiently.
Benefits of Business Apps
- Increase Productivity: As a small business owner, you are responsible for many tasks and operations. Streamlining your tasks via business apps helps keep your to-do list organized so you can focus on getting things done.
- Reduce Labor Costs: Hiring employees or professional services for your business can be costly. If you’re like most businesses, you’re on a tight budget. Business apps can save you the money of hiring marketers, bookkeepers, and more without sacrificing functionality.
- Manage Your Business From Anywhere: The convenience of being able to manage your business’s operations or communicate with staff from your mobile phone helps ensure your business is still running smoothly, even when you’re gone.
Best Apps for Small Business
Skip Ahead To:
Brainstorming and Startup Apps
Business Planning Apps
Business Communication Apps
Payroll and Accounting Apps
Marketing Apps
Design Apps
Project Management Apps
Time Management/Productivity Apps
Networking Apps
Brainstorming and Startup Apps
1. Google Docs
Easily used on computers and mobile devices, Google Docs provides the tools you need to create word documents, spreadsheets, forms, and slideshows for free. Content created in Google Docs is easily accessible to team members without sacrificing important privacy features. Additionally, the app saves editing history and allows for live commenting for optimal communication between team members.
For a more feature-rich experience, third party add-ons are available to enhance your user experience and increase the app capabilities.
Pricing: Free
2. Coggle
Coggle allows you to easily create and share notes with your team members and develop exceptional flow charts individually or as a group. While sharing content is easily done with this app, it also allows users to create unlimited private diagrams that you can keep even if you cancel your subscription.
Since the company offers a free plan, you can try out Coggle for yourself before committing to ensure it’s the right choice for your business’s needs.
Pricing: Free – $8/month
3. Popplet
An excellent app for visualizing ideas, Popplet is an easy-to-use app that allows business owners and colleagues to brainstorm collaboratively in real-time or individually. Users are able to organize ideas by color, add images or videos, and draw as well as rearrange and reshape ideas after they are added.
Popplet is compatible with tablets and computers, with an option to try the app for free before committing to ensure it meets your business’s brainstorming needs.
Pricing: Free – $1.99/month or $19.99/year
Business Planning Apps
4. LivePlan
Business planning is a breeze with this app that allows you to create a pitch, make a budget and business forecast, and compare your numbers with your competitors. Connect LivePlan with other business management apps such as QuickBooks, Xero or manually enter accounting information to manage business’s finances, oversee budgets, and keep your sales goals on track with the LivePlan dashboard.
Pricing: $15/month – $20/month
5. Enloop
Enloop is a business planning software that offers users a variety of management tools such as finance ratio analysis, real-time performance scores, and automatically generated financial reports. This app will even generate text for your business plan based on your business information. Enloop offers a seven-day free trial so that you can try their business planning management app risk for free.
Pricing: Free – $39.95/month
Business Communication Apps
6. Slack
Slack provides a platform for instant messaging between team members and the capability to organize users into public or private channels. This app makes communicating with your team faster and more convenient than email chains, saving you time and increasing your productivity.
Easily search and filter conversations to refer back to messages, photos, videos, or files that are automatically archived by the app. However, perhaps the best feature of the app is that business owners can add an unlimited number of users for free.
Pricing: Free – $12.50/user/month
7. Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a business-friendly communication app that’s easily used on mobile devices and computers. Video conferencing, calls, and instant messaging are all possible with this app, as well as in-app document editing with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
Business owners can try this app for free to ensure it fits their business needs and increase the app’s capabilities by doing a paid plan.
Pricing: Free – $20/user/month
Payroll and Accounting Apps
8. QuickBooks
QuickBooks is a popular and effective accounting software that provides tools to optimize the financial health of your company with sales and expenses tracking. Viewing profit and loss reports, paying employees and vendors, and examining financial statements is easily done with QuickBooks’s management tools. Moreover, all these impressive features are accessible via the app’s user-friendly dashboard.
Pricing: $7.50/month – $75/month
9. ADP
With plans created for different business sizes, ADP offers a variety of options to ensure your business’s needs are met. This app offers payroll services, recruiting tools, time management tools, HR services, and more. The best part is that you can choose the services that you need for your business and leave the rest.
Pricing: Varies depending on business needs
10. Gusto
Gusto provides not only payroll and HR features; you can also onboard and manage new employees with the app’s new-hire reporting. Additionally, filing and reporting payroll taxes is easily done through the app at both state and federal levels. This is a full-service app that offers users all the features they need to successfully manage their payroll and accounting on one platform.
Pricing: Starts at $39 plus $6 per person per month
Marketing Apps
11. Hootsuite
With social media as one of the most powerful tools available to small businesses, managing your business’s social network channels through an app like Hootsuite saves you valuable time and makes social media marketing a snap. This app keeps 5 to 35 of your social media platforms in one place (depending on the plan you choose), making monitoring and interacting customer interactions easy and fast.
Pricing: $25/month – $599/month
12. Mailchimp
With Mailchimp, businesses can create and manage mailing lists, view audience data, and review valuable insights about the effectiveness of marketing campaigns – all in one place. The app also allows you to create custom email templates to give your email marketing campaigns a personalized touch.
Pricing: Free – $299/month
13. Yelp for Business
Adding or claiming your business on Yelp is the first step to taking advantage of all of the benefits this business app has to offer. With Yelp for Business, you can interact with customers, relay important information about your business, and review analytics to improve performance and reach new customers. Businesses can also advertise on the app to reach customers looking for related services.
Pricing: Free – Varied pricing depending on business needs
Design Apps
14. Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe Creative Cloud is a hub of tools to design and create for your business that keeps all related apps in one, manageable setting. Businesses that use Adobe Creative Cloud have access to a plethora of features such as Adobe stock images, Typekit, and Behance, as well as the ability to sync and share files within the app. This app works well for managing creative projects and tools, leaving users free to create.
Pricing: For businesses, $33.99/month – $79.99/month
15. Canva
Canva is a design app that allows users to collaborate on custom templates and designs. With this app, you can easily share and print designs professionally, bringing your team’s ideas to life hassle-free. The best part is that with Canva’s free plan, you can access thousands of design tools and 250,000+ templates.
Pricing: Free – $30/month/person
Project Management Apps
16. Monday
Monday is a project management app that prioritizes communication while making organizing tasks super simple. Not only can you create projects within the app, but you can also add tasks and clear steps for each task to effectively communicate project needs to team members. Also, Monday makes it easy to share the status of each project. This app is available on desktop and mobile devices.
Pricing: Varies depending on business needs
17. Asana
Productivity is key with Asana, the project management app that prioritizes streamlining workflow. The app provides a platform for your entire team to organize projects and communicate their status to make accomplishing their goals easier. Additionally, you can create projects within the app, give concrete timelines, and outline steps for optimal communication among your team members.
Pricing: Free – $24.99/user/month
18. Trello
Trello provides a space to organize projects in terms of priority using boards, lists, and cards. The app also helps keep users on track with due dates and calendar commands. For businesses that use multiple business apps, Trello can be synced with additional apps such as Dropbox and Google Docs for a streamlined work experience.
Pricing: Free – Varied pricing depending on business needs
Time Management/Productivity Apps
19. Google Workspace
Google Workspace plans allow users to create a custom business email account and provide access to helpful tools such as Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, and more. This business app’s priority is to encourage productivity by compiling all your business tools on one platform that is optimal for team collaboration.
Pricing: $6/user/month – $18/user/month
20. OmniFocus
Create and organize projects into to-do lists with OmniFocus, the time management and productivity app that helps keep projects on track. To make organization even easier, this app also allows users to sync projects with Apple and PC products.
Pricing: Starts at $49.99
21. RescueTime
RescueTime helps users effectively manage their time by creating detailed reports on time spent on apps and websites. You can also set time limits for specific apps or websites and even restrict websites that distract you from important work tasks with the app. RescueTime is a great tool for anyone who has a habit of getting distracted during work hours by distractions like social media or news and would like help holding themselves accountable or setting limits.
Pricing: $78/year or $12/month
22. Todoist
Create to-do lists to organize all of the projects and tasks you’re juggling with Todoist, a productivity app that allows you to quickly and easily add tasks to your calendar so you can focus on getting things done. For teams, Todoist also offers collaborative tools that allow you to delegate tasks, discuss projects, and track project progress, all in one place.
Todoist is available on everything from smartwatches, mobile devices, and computers so that you can take your to-do list anywhere you are.
Pricing: Free – $5/user/month
Networking Apps
23. LinkedIn
Find qualified candidates for your team and network with business professionals with the popular business app, LinkedIn. This networking app also allows users to learn about various topics such as career development, marketing, and data science with courses offered on their platform. For new business owners, especially, LinkedIn is a great tool to build a network of experienced professionals to help you start and grow your business.
Pricing: Free or LinkedIn Premium Business: $59.99/month
24. Shapr
Shapr is a networking app created specifically for startups that helps entrepreneurs meet people at every stage of their business. With the Shapr app, business owners can network, find talented employees, raise funds, and find mentors that are experts in their field. This business app provides a platform for all of your startup’s outside communication needs on one, easy-to-use platform.
Pricing: Free – $99.99
Getting online
As Madonna once sang, we’re living in a digital world. OK, I’ve paraphrased, but she might well have done were Material Girl to have been released in 2020 and not 1984. Regardless of the industry you are in, there aren’t many businesses that wouldn’t benefit from a permanent online presence.
As good as social media apps like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are at getting your song lyrics out there (let’s continue the music theme…), you need a place for your back catalogue.
A website will represent your business’s values and work, while making it look professional and trustworthy. You don’t have to be a computer whizz or super rich to build your own. There are a host of free website builders including Weebly and WordPress. Don’t forget to include contact details such as your phone number, email address and your relevant social networks. And make sure your logo, brand identity and “tone” are consistent. If your business is very social media heavy, Hootsuite or Buffer can manage it all, so that it doesn’t end up managing you!
Not only is a website a place where prospective clients or customers can find out about you, but where you can find out about them. Google Analytics lets you monitor how people are discovering you, what content is driving them in your direction and how long they are staying with you. Once you know who your customers are, you can use Mailchimp: features include the ability to design newsletters, build mailing lists and view performance reports to enable you to send out more relevant content.
Sorting out your finances
One of the areas where new businesses often struggle to hit the high notes is money management and cash flow. Trip up here and the whole venture can fail. Two of the most popular accounting software apps are Xero and FreshBooks. They let novices and pros alike sort out their own expenses, invoices and complicated tax forms as well as making sure that you stay on top of your spending.
Many types of business structures in the UK require you to have your own business bank account, but you don’t have to go through the traditional, sometimes expensive, big bank route. Instead you could try out a challenger app, like Coconut and Tide, set up precisely with small businesses in mind and which also offer basic accounting tools.
Payment
Now that you have the tools to sort out your finances, you need to make sure you actually have some to sort out. Mobile payment apps allow your business to accept payments from customers on the go. Payanywhere and PayPal Here provide a free mobile app and card reader so that you can accept credit and debit card payments, check they’ve gone through, and easily create and send customised invoices.
Getting organised
For a new venture to succeed you need to make sure every team member is singing from the same song sheet. Even the most organised small business owners need a helping hand by utilising management tools, especially if you are employing remote workers. Google Drive lets you share files and documents, allowing everyone to work on them at the same time. Project management apps like Asana and Trello go a step further offering all sorts of tools for collaboration and task delegation. Clockify allows you to track the time you and your team spend on a project.
If you are the type of person whose head is bursting with ideas, plans, to-do lists, dates and times, you can free up some brain space by storing everything using secure cloud based software. Evernote or Calendly are two examples, so you won’t miss an important phone call or meeting.
Communication
Talking of talking, communication is key to any successful business. But gone are the days of long commutes or business trips, you can do all that in the comfort of the office – or even your own home. Communication apps like Skype or RingCentral Meetings can be used for phone calls and video conferencing, wherever your staff or clients may be in the world. Slack is like WhatsApp but for the workplace, but hopefully with fewer memes and cat pictures!
Time management
Have you ever tried thinking of a song while another is playing in the background? It’s hard to stay focused when there are so many distractions around you, some work related, many not. Technology rides to the rescue again with a number of productivity apps that do a variety of different tasks to help you stay focused on the job at hand. Sanebox can sort out the wheat from the email chaff, hiding distractions, banning spammers, and sending you reminders to follow up important messages. RescueTime can be used to help you better understand where you are spending your time online and how you can take back more control.
Conclusion
When you start a business, it can be hard to choose which apps are going to help you the most. There are so many options available, so how do you find the best ones?