Anyone who has owned or run any kind of business knows that there are tools out there to help you get the job done. But which ones should you actually use? And, more importantly, how do you use them?
I created this free list of the best free tools for small business owners to help you decide. You’ll find everything from time tracking software to invoicing systems. Best of all, everything is available online and completely free.
ProfitBooks – Top Free Accounting Software
ProfitBooks is a fast-growing and amazingly simple to use free accounting software. It lets you create beautiful invoices, track expenses and manage inventory without any accounting knowledge.
With ProfitBooks accounting software, you can create professional estimates or invoices and track outstanding payments due with few clicks.
Whether you are manufacturing, distributing, selling, servicing, or just managing the inventory, ProfitBooks can handle all your business processes with ease.You can easily share the transaction data with your accountant and know what’s going on with your business with just a few clicks and take better decisions.Some of the key features of Profitbooks:
- Create beautiful invoices
- Receive online payments using payment gateway
- Record advance payments
- Track accounts receivables with sales reports
- Simplify purchase workflow with POs
- Track manufacturing processes
- Maintain product batches
- Track inventory flow at multiple warehouses
- Easily find low stock using powerful reports
- Generate detailed tax reports
- Collaborate with your accountant online
- Record manual journals
- Track business expenses
Google Docs – Best Free Office Suite
Google Docs is an online word processing program by Google.
Google Docs brings your documents to life with smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and paragraphs. You can choose from hundreds of fonts, add links, images, and drawings.
Google Docs also enables collaboration between colleagues. As the document is saved in the cloud, the creator can share the link to the file for editing to other people.
With Google Docs, users also do not have to worry about hitting the save button every time they make changes. The application automatically saves the document at regular intervals so even when the internet connection is lost, users can still find their additions and modifications.
Some key features of Google Docs:
- Editing
- Comments
- Styling
- Fonts
- Linking
- Images
- Drawings
- Templates
- Built-In Google Search
- Add-Ons
Proofhub
This easy-to-use project management and team collaboration software is a great option for small businesses. By replacing the multiple tools required for task management, collaboration, time tracking, communication, file sharing, and reporting with a single all-in-one software, and gives teams a central source of truth.
Sellsy
One of the challenges with managing sales processes can be combining sales process data from various channels (online, PoS and inside sales). Sellsy combines that with client relations and contact marketing, as well as inventory management and even time tracking.
Canva – Best Free Image Editor
Canva is a multimedia design platform that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters and other visual content.
Canva gives businesses, organizations, and even individual professionals with a very simple design platform that enables them to create amazing and professional quality graphic designs. This online design solution offers a throng of powerful features, including a simple drag-and-drop design tool and a vast collection of over 1 million photographs, graphics, and fonts.
Some key features of Canva:
- Adding text to photos
- Speech bubble maker
- Image Transparency Tool
- Photo Enhancer
- 8,000 Templates
- Photo Blur
- Photo vignette
- Design grids
- Free icons
- Photo frames
- Stickers
Buffer – Top Free Social Media Manager
Buffer is an internet-based app intended for managing social media content. Its primary function is for sharing content across today’s well-known social media sites. It offers the ability to spread content via a simple approach. The app has the ability to connect to all social media accounts while making it easier to create and schedule posts.
Instead of traditionally logging in on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and other social media sites, Buffer will do it all at once. It also makes it convenient for users to create posts and have them uploaded with a single click. The app contains a browser extension for seamless integration with WordPress, Chrome, RSS readers, and other important tools for sniffing out content.
Some key features of Buffer:
- Multiple posts and tweets
- Social profile sharing
- Profile management
- Multi-media format sharing
- Agency/business planning
- Analytics and insights
- Stats comparison
- iOS and Android support
- Team collaboration (via administrator rights)
- 2-step account login
- Customized scheduling
- Standard buffering
Connecteam
When you have many deskless or remote employees, Connecteam is the best free small business tool for you. After all, it was specially designed and built to cater to these employees! Apart from being super easy to use, Connecteam enhances your daily business routine. How so? Connecteam is the leading business tool that makes it easy for managers to offer feedback, enhance engagement, track work hours easily to enhance timesheet management and payroll process, share intuitive schedules, remain transparent, and unite all workplace communication and collaboration – for free.
- Get peace of mind with GPS time tracking so when employees clock in and out from their phones, a real-time timestamp and GPS location is automatically tagged. This creates more efficient and easy to manage timesheets and payroll processes.
- Create interactive communication with group or one-on-one chat and share GIFs, videos, and pictures. Decide whether your team can engage with your update with likes and comments or if it’s a one-way announcement to keep everyone on the same page.
- Share an efficient job schedule when you easily assign a schedule (use drag & drop, templates, etc.) that’s based on different requirements. For each shift, offer additional key information so your team has everything available in a tap like address, tasks to complete, time, and more. Employees can accept or reject shifts, check-in when they show up to the site, and more – while on the go!
- Manage reports on the go and in real-time like an incident report, expense reimbursement, operational checklists, and more so you can ensure compliance from top-to-bottom.
- Boost engagement through announcements, newsletters, and updates that you can segment per group and channel to avoid information overload. Share goals met, new sales landed, key protocols, and more.
- Offer a better training & onboarding experience so your team has direct access to training resources, such as the employee handbook, safety protocols, benefits, etc.
- Use the searchable employee directory to keep all work contacts on the app instead of your personal phone, easily find the contact needed with a quick search (name, job title, location, etc.) and quickly engage with the contact through action buttons like a phone call, email, or chat.
Google Docs (& Friends)
You can’t write about free online services without mentioning Google, so we’re going to start with the Internet giant everyone knows. This is a great tool when you need to collaborate on files.
When it comes to sharing files and collaborating on documents, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides are the way to go. The files are stored in your Google Drive and are a wonderful way to avoid those endless back-and-forth emails when collaborating on various documents.
Join.me by LogMeIn
Gone are the days of conference calls. Well, maybe not gone but definitely changed. Solutions like LogMeIn’s join.me conferencing tool lets you present to multiple employees or clients from the comfort of your home or office chair, saving you long trips.
Hubspot CRM
A free CRM solution that promises to stay free forever and offers automation features that help track customer interactions. You can also create and follow sales-related tasks and get a good overview of your sales funnel at any given time.
xTuple
The path from product manufacturing to sitting in the hands-on of your customers can be complex. xTuple is a free open-source ERP solution with an integrated CRM system, intended mostly for companies producing products rather than services.
IFTTT
“If this then that” is a simple but flexible automation system that integrates hundreds of apps and services to create automated processes for things. For example, you can create an IFTTT so that leads from your website turn into contacts in HubSpot.
Conclusion
There are countless tools, resources, apps, and software programs for small business owners. Big businesses can certainly purchase enterprise-level software to help run their company. Get started with theses free tools.