Running a small startup is not easy! It’s hard to keep up with all tasks, stay on top of your finances, make data-driven decisions, measure your marketing, and keep up with the day to day. And these are tasks you need to do to just keep going … there is still a lot more that you have to do every day to make your company excel.
There are many useful web applications that not only make your life easier, but can also help you grow your business. Google Apps lets you set up and access all applications with one set of users and has some great integration points. If you want to set up a clean, fast, and integrated startup company infrastructure in less than a week, here are the applications that you should be using–both from Google’s suite and a few others.
Simple Daily Tasks
By using the following applications you can save time and energy and focus on growing your business and building your core value. Email and calendar applications are the two core pieces necessary for all users. Then there are also everyday tasks–like payroll and faxing docs.
Gmail is a fully featured email client that has seven gigabytes of storage and also solid search tools that help your users find information fast. Gmail is also the center of the universe of every business user.
Organizing your schedule shouldn’t be a burden. With Google Calendar, it’s easy to keep track of life’s important events, all in one place.
eFax is the premier Internet fax service, providing fax solutions to individuals, small businesses, and large enterprises since 1995. While we don’t do a lot of faxing at Optify, this program is a great help when we need to. It lets you receive and send faxes via email, a key time saver.
MindMeister lets you create, share and collaboratively work on mind maps, making it easy to plan projects, exchange ideas and brainstorm online with your colleagues.
TrackMyHours.com is an hour tracking and billing system designed for businesses and consultants that really need to keep track of what they are doing hour by hour. TrackMyHours lets you send invoices and share detailed information with clients.
Money Matters: Getting financing right is a must
Concur Breeze is designed specifically to help small businesses take the hassle out of expense reporting, allowing your employees to spend more time making your business successful.
FreshBooks is the leader in online billing and bookkeeping. Send, track and collect payments quickly. Great for teams, freelancers, and subscription services.
Data Driven Decisions
ShufflePoint is a web service that integrates Google Analytics with Excel, PowerPoint, and Google Gadgets. Create dynamic spreadsheets and presentations or quickly build a website with Gadgets.
Bime is an easy yet powerful service to connect and analyze data in any organization. Bime delivers a simple-to-use intuitive way to create stunning data visualizations and predictive models.
Smartsheet’s online project management tool takes an easy to use spreadsheet to the next level with features such as a Gantt chart, collapsible sub-tasks, and attachments and discussions on any row.
Social Media
Manymoon is the number one team collaboration application for Google Apps and trusted by tens of thousands of businesses. Put your social network to use to securely get work done.
BatchBook is a lightweight but powerful customer resource management (CRM) tool that allows you to easily organize contacts, monitor social network, and track leads and deals.
Still Waiting on Others
There are a few applications I would of liked to see on this list including Dropbox, WordPress, Mint.com, Campfire and some sort of a Twitter client. I am sure they will be there in the near future.
If you know of other good applications that are useful, mention them by leaving a comment below.
Conclusion
When starting a small business or a venture-backed startup, getting all the tools in place is the first order of business. Using Google apps you can get your business email, calendar, finance, data, and social media needs at the fingertips of every employee with very little effort. Google’s many applications eliminate the use of multiple passwords and bring all needs and requirements under one powerful package. Buying into an application platform strategy like Google Apps lets you tune and expand your application set as your needs change. At Optify we were fortunate to figure out a great way to use so many online apps. I just wish all of these application packages were available two years ago!
