Running a small business from home is doable with a tight budget. You only need to invest in essential home office equipment and furniture to ensure a functional and conducive workspace. A computer or laptop is a must-have, while an executive desk for your workstation and an office dresser for storage are also required. Since you’ll be doing transactions and work collaboration from home, you need online business platforms to ensure maximum productivity. Here are the seven best online business tools for your small business.
1. Trello
With a small team, you can keep all tasks, finished projects, and ongoing projects in one place. It’s a productivity powerhouse that offers a simple interface and is extremely easy to use. Its drag-and-drop feature lets you navigate through the tool in a breeze.
Top Features:
- Boards: Organize tasks and projects into visual boards.
- Lists: Create lists within boards to represent different stages or categories.
- Cards: Add tasks, ideas, or notes as cards within lists.
- Labels: Label cards with color-coded labels for easy categorization and filtering.
- Power-Ups: Extend Trello’s functionality with integrations to other apps and services.
- Butler Automation: Automate repetitive tasks with Butler, Trello’s built-in automation tool.
Pricing:
- Free
- Standard – $10 per user/month
- Enterprise – $17.50 per user/month
2. Slack
Slack is the communication tool your team needs. It supports team collaboration at a global scale, offering unlimited channels. Communicating in Slack offers efficiency and organization.
Top Features:
- Channels: Create channels for different teams, projects, or topics to organize conversations and collaborate.
- File sharing: Share files, documents, and images with your team for easy collaboration and reference.
- Voice and video calls: Make voice and video calls directly within Slack for quick communication and remote meetings.
- Integration with other apps: Connect Slack with popular productivity tools like Google Drive, Trello, and more to streamline workflows.
- Bot and automation capabilities: Use Slackbots and automation to streamline tasks, set reminders, and get information without leaving Slack.
Pricing:
- Pro – $7.25 per person/month
- Business+ – $12.50 per person/month
- Enterprise – Contact sales
3. Calendly
Calendly is one of the top business tools to ensure meetings are on-point. It’s a scheduling automation platform that speeds up the work process and sales cycles.
Top Features:
- Scheduling: Calendly allows you to create personalized scheduling links that sync with your calendar, making it easy for others to book time with you.
- Calendar Integration: Calendly integrates seamlessly with popular calendar platforms such as Google Calendar, Outlook, and Office 365, automatically updating your availability and preventing double bookings.
- Time Zone Detection: Calendly automatically detects the time zone of your invitees and adjusts availability accordingly, eliminating the need for manual time zone conversions.
- Group Scheduling: Calendly allows you to set up group events, such as team meetings or webinars, and enables multiple invitees to book slots within the same event.
- Event Buffer Times: Calendly allows you to set buffer times before and after events to give yourself time for preparation or breaks between meetings.
Pricing:
- Basic – Free
- Essentials – $8 per seat/month
- Professional – $12 per seat/month
- Teams – $16 per seat/month
- Enterprise – Contact sales
4. Google Drive
Google Drive is one of the go-to online business platforms for entrepreneurs and professionals. This is where you store, share, and work on files via cloud storage from any gadget or device. This online tool is necessary if you’re running a small home business.
Top Features:
- Collaborative Editing: Collaborate in real-time on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with multiple users, allowing for seamless teamwork.
- Offline Access: Access and edit files offline and sync changes once you reconnect to the internet.
- Version History: Keep track of file changes and restore previous versions if needed.
- Built-in Apps: Create and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations using Google’s suite of productivity apps directly within Google Drive.
- Security: Benefit from Google’s robust security measures, including two-factor authentication, data encryption, and regular security audits to protect your files and data.
Pricing:
- Personal – Free
- Business Standard – $12 per user/month
5. Grammarly
Every entrepreneur needs a writing assistant to ensure all emails, business proposals, and sales copies are free from typos, spelling, and grammatical errors.
Top Features:
- Style and Tone Check: Grammarly helps improve your writing style and tone by suggesting better word choices and sentence structure.
- Plagiarism Checker: Grammarly can detect plagiarism by comparing your text with billions of web pages, helping you ensure your writing is original.
- Sentence Structure and Clarity: Grammarly analyzes sentence structure and provides suggestions to make your writing more concise and clear.
- Vocabulary Enhancement: Grammarly offers suggestions to enhance your vocabulary by providing synonyms and alternate word choices.
- Contextual Writing Suggestions: Grammarly provides contextual suggestions based on the topic and purpose of your writing, helping you tailor your content to your audience.
- Genre-specific Writing Style: Grammarly offers suggestions based on different genres, such as academic, business, creative, and technical writing.
Pricing:
- Basic – Free
- Premium – $12/month
- Business – $15/month
6. Miro
If you’re working with a remote team, Miro is an essential digital whiteboard tool that makes collaboration easy. Create notes and designs while embedding videos and online chats with this online business application.
Top Features:
- Versatile canvas: Miro provides a virtual canvas where teams can create, organize, and share various types of content, such as sticky notes, images, shapes, and freehand drawings.
- Extensive templates: Miro offers various pre-designed templates for different use cases, including brainstorming, project management, agile frameworks, user story mapping, and more.
- Voting and polling: Miro enables teams to conduct voting and polling activities, making it easy to gather feedback and make decisions as a group.
- Robust media support: Miro supports various media types, including images, videos, documents, and interactive prototypes, making it a versatile platform for visual collaboration.
Pricing:
- Free
- Starter – $8 per member/month
- Business $16 per member/month
- Enterprise – Contact sales
7. Freshbooks
Freshbook is an accounting software and invoicing online platform for business owners and accountants. Send professional invoices that impress your clients. This platform is well-suited for smaller companies with sole proprietors.
Top Features:
- Expense Tracking: Keep track of business expenses by capturing receipts, categorizing expenses, and generating expense reports.
- Time Tracking: Track billable hours for projects and clients and quickly convert them into invoices.
- Client Portal: Provide a secure portal for clients to view invoices, estimates, and project details and make payments online.
- Reporting: Generate various financial reports, including profit and loss statements, expense reports, and tax summaries.
- Automated Late Payment Reminders: Set up automatic reminders for overdue invoices to help you get paid faster.
- Multi-Currency Support: Invoice and accept payments in multiple currencies to cater to international clients.
- Tax Preparation: Simplify tax preparation with accurate expense tracking and categorization for easy tax filing.
Pricing:
- Lite – $8.50
- Plus – $15
- Premium – $27.50
- Select – Custom Pricing
Conclusion
Running your small home business will be easier if you use a few of these online business tools. Start with the free versions when establishing your new company. Once your business grows, you can invest in the lower plans and upgrade if necessary. In today’s world, automation and digitalization are ingredients to a successful business venture.