When I first started Intensify, I was scared to spend money. I thought that success would come from spending as little as possible, while making as much as possible. It turns out, this is a bad approach. If you look at Uber, Facebook, Amazon, or anyone you’ve seen on Sharktank, they all grew their businesses by pouring money into them. Leveraging software is an easy and fairly inexpensive way to free up more of your valuable time and get your business to grow faster.
I have 2 key prerequisites that have to be met before I subscribe to software:
1. It has to play well with other software.
Integrations are key when you are driven to run a business as efficiently as possible. If your invoicing software doesn’t speak to your accounting software, then you are going to spend every month entering invoices into your accounting software manually. As you get more clients, the time wasted intensifies until you find yourself looking for new software and trying to navigate a data migration. Not fun and a total waste of time.
2. It has to be pretty.
This may sound silly, but who wants to have to work in an ugly user interface every day? In order for an application to be useful, you have to use it and it’s even better if you enjoy using it.
These are our 4 Best Small Business Software Programs for 2023:
1. Xero – a versatile, user-friendly online accounting platform.
Spring for accounting software right away. Don’t spend time messing around in Excel trying to create spreadsheets to replicate accounting software. So, why Xero?
- Automatically pull in bank account and credit card transactions
- Create rules to automatically categorize repeat transactions
- Add notes on expenses and snap photos of receipts with the app or throw your receipts in a yearly file
- Automate your payroll – most payroll services charge $100 – $200 per month – setting up with Xero is fairly easy and it’s free!
- Xero automatically creates pretty financial statements, which you can review at anytime
- Price: You’ll probably want to use the middle tier package for $21 a month when you use our 30% off coupon.
2. G-Suite – log right into Gmail with your email @ your business’s domain.
Are you still using an email account like myamazingbusiness@gmail.com? Stop. It doesn’t look professional and we want your business to be taken seriously! Once you set up your domain with G-Suite, you can use your email to log into any Google product like Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Docs, etc. You can also create groups where you add an email, such as info@yourdomain.com that emails specific members of your organization. One of my favorite things I use groups for is to create a group such as receipts@yourdomain.com. I use this for any emailed receipts and have them automatically parsed into a folder in case I ever need them.
Price: $5 per user
3. Google Analytics – track everything that happens on your website!
Having Google Analytics on your website is a must in 2017! And just simply adding the main code is not enough. You want to track everything that happens on your website. If you do not know how, hire someone to help track form submission and clicks to phone numbers and emails as events and goals. You should also enable tracking demographic data, set up a retargeting list, and monitor the most frequently visited pages and work on them first when improving your website.
Price: Free
4. Trello – A collaborative visual organizational tool for work, life, and projects
Trello is amazing tool for creating to do lists, measuring progress on complicated projects and organizing your life. It integrates very well with G-Suite and other apps and can really help you grasp what you are doing at a high level. Set due dates and receive emails when tasks are due, create a project board and assign coworkers tasks, and save articles right from your browser to Trello through Trello’s extension. Trello is great for all businesses, from a Digital Marketing Company to an Ecommerce Store.
Price: Free
