20 Must-Have Productivity Tools for Small Businesses

 

What Are Productivity Tools ?

To identify your needs for tools, you need to know what you’re searching for. Productivity tools are a digital counterpart of office productivity tools — spreadsheets, sticky notes, calendars, memos, etc.

They help enhance workflow, automate operations, and limit the time necessary to perform the activity by maximizing the output.

Among the most popular tools for productivity, you may find time management software, project and task management apps, to-do lists, communication and collaboration tools, and many more.

What Are The Best Productivity Tools for Small Businesses?

There are so many apps to pick from that it’s easy for headaches. And there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to choosing the best company productivity tools.

There is, however, a simple recipe that can help you make the right decision. Opt for software that automates and optimizes work, saves money and time, and can be combined with other productivity tools.

Also, note that every firm has various needs and methods of organizing work. Something that works for a small company may not be suitable for a large enterprise.

If you’re not sure which tools to choose, we’ve got your back. Here’s the complete list of the most excellent productivity tools for small businesses and everyone who wants to be more productive!

Time management systems can help to record billable hours, make accurate estimates, and track time against them. They are also beneficial in enhancing productivity, saving time money, and cutting costs on ineffective initiatives.

• TimeCamp

TimeCamp is a powerful time tracking program that automatically tracks time so you and your team can focus on what truly matters. In Timecamp, you can arrange all your projects with subtasks, personnel, and money to understand how you and your staff work and better manage resources.

It’s a terrific time tracker for agencies that need to track billable time to bill customers accurately, boost productivity, limit scope creep, and ensure deadlines are always met.

You can easily link TimeCamp with other apps for easy workflow and project management.

Here are some of the primary features:

• Automatic and manual time tracking
• Offline time tracking
• Powerful reports with graphs, figures, and efficient outcomes
• Tracking goals
• Attendance module with different types of days (remote work, vacations, leaves, and more) (remote work, holidays, leaves, and more)
• Timesheets with approvals
• Budgeting
• GPS tracking
• Calendar view with colors for visualizing
• Available on Desktop (Windows, Mac, and Linux), and has native mobile apps available for iOS and Android

Take your business to the next level and sign up for free!

• Everhour

Everhour is a cloud-based time-tracking program devoted to teams. It combines easy team and project management capabilities to help you keep track of time and organize tasks and processes.

It features eight modules that enable handling all team parts—scheduling with a Gantt chart, module for monitoring time, projects, clients, team information, rich reports, invoicing, and expenses. That allows you to gather all the essential facts regarding work and your organization.

• DeskTime

DeskTime is a real-time automatic time tracker. The app notes and evaluates your productivity, and it offers rich data graphs with a detailed analysis of how you spent your time at the computer. The offline time tracking function lets you record activities you spend time on when away from the computer but as part of your profession.

The app tracks URLs, apps, and document names. An employee snapshots tool also gives you broad insights into your team’s activity. If you need to track productivity on the go, the mobile app (Android, iOS) (Android, iOS).

Other functions include an absence calendar, invoicing, job scheduling, and interfaces with 3rd party apps like Trello, Gmail, Outlook, and more. You may also use DeskTime as a time clocking tool to check staff attendance.

See the contrast between DeskTime & TimeCamp.

• Tick

Tick is a lightweight utility for tracking time. It’s simple but contains all the necessary capabilities. It allows you to track billable time hours and control the budget to bill clients appropriately. To obtain fast feedback on your tasks and projects, you may examine the monitored data in reports.

Tick is a cross-platform solution available on iOS, Android, the Apple Watch, desktop PC, or Chrome extension. Additionally, the tool may be coupled with 3rd part programs like Trello, Asana, or Zapier.

• Focus enhancer

A concentration enhancer is a simple yet powerful tool, and it allows you to log work time with the popular Pomodoro technique. The device is a beautiful choice if you seek a Pomodoro timer to measure time in 25-minutes intervals.

The free edition of the focus booster offers 20 Pomodoro sessions per month, easy time tracking, and productivity reporting. The program offers the fundamental elements necessary to manage and track time—a to-do list, uncomplicated time tracking, tiny and minimalistic timer, light and dark modes, reports with date, client, or label.

You may check your progress in a friendly dashboard that visualizes all data or manually makes entries to your timesheet.

Project and Task Management

Tools for project management allow keeping all relevant things in one place without switching between several programs. Additionally, connectors allow teams to mix several technologies into one to streamline tasks.

• ClickUp

ClickUp is an all-encompassing tool for project management and team collaboration. It enables you to communicate information with team members in multiple formats. But the application also allows you to organize work and projects the way you choose.

It also replaces long chaotic email threads by providing you with a simple chat environment for group and individual interactions—everything you need to organize projects and exchange information with your team.

Streamline projects, plan every step, and make quick changes. You may also schedule workflow, manage team capacity, and follow all processes. Your team can combine ClickUp with other apps for additional efficiency and configure the tool according to personal preferences. It contains many smaller proprietary features, so it’s easy to tailor every project area.

The program is available on the web, desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux), mobile (Android, iOS), Amazon Alexa enabled, and works with the Google Assistant.

• Asana

Asana is one of the most popular project management and communication solutions. It helps to arrange projects and tasks so teams can get on the correct track.

With Asana, you can bring your team’s objectives, plans, tasks, files, and more together in one shared location. View your work any way you wish with a listview, timeline, boards, or calendar view. It enables you simply see dependencies, visualize activities, and specify every step of the workflow. Additionally, you can personalize workflow and simplify it with automation rules.

Asana allows you to see each element of the project and the larger picture with real-time updates. Integrations with over 100 apps assist in streamlining procedures.

Asana can help you in many aspects, either to launch a product, monitor projects for your clients or observe organizational objectives and goals.

⇒ Check our connection with Asana and put more automation into your workflow!

• monday.com

monday.com is a simple to use task management tool. It helps teams construct and shape workflow in minutes to plan, run, and follow their processes, projects, and operations.

The program includes four primary capabilities that are perfectly linked with each other to provide you with a single platform:

1. Workload with all projects and tasks
2. Timeline to display all planned events
3. Dashboard with a main overview of work
4. Charts to visualize data in the form of graphs

You may quickly and easily arrange tasks using the drag-and-drop feature and integrate monday.com with other apps.

Communication and Collaboration

Good communication and teamwork mean engaged, happy staff. So take care of the inner relationships with these greatest productivity tools for cooperation. They can also help you better communicate with clients and stakeholders.

• Slack

Slack is a seemingly obvious choice but because of its ability to interact with practically every third-party tool, you may use it to collaborate with your team in any form.

Slack may successfully replace long, chaotic email threads by focussing communication on one platform. The app lets you follow up with everything relating to certain subjects, projects, or teams in their designated channels.

You can simply discover everything in conversation history by utilizing the ‘search’ option. Share your Slack channels with clients, send files, automate normal activities for speedier collaboration. Slack provides the option of voice calls and video conferencing so you may connect with your team the way you prefer to.

• Podio

Podio is a more professional software for productivity. It’s an online office where you can arrange your business, people, files, and anything else the way you choose. Podio lets you arrange the space within the app to get the most out of it. It offers a customizable interface with a drag-and-drop feature.

App Items — the records created inside your apps – can be displayed using a wide array of layouts. Reports give you an easy method to display sales pipelines, project budgets, time remaining on deliverables, and more.

You can also utilize Podio for task management and communicate directly with peers.

Podio assists in managing not just projects but also linked meetings and activities. It can also support you in the recruitment process of staff for your project. The design is friendly, and what is more significant – it allows you to organize tasks, send messages, and create to-do lists.

• Automate.io

Automate.io is a no-code solution to integrate your work apps quickly. Sync two or more apps and automate your workflow cycle so that you focus more on vital portions of your business while micromanaging is performed by Automate.io.

For instance, if you want to maintain all the leads from Facebook on a Google Sheet and then place them on a drip, Automate.io allows you accomplish it smoothly.

Automate.io is an excellent automation platform for teams that wish to streamline and simplify procedures. It’s straightforward to use, and therefore it’s acceptable even for the non-tech-savvy people.

• Pandadoc

PandaDoc is a tool for authoring, approving, tracking, and esigning docs in real-time. It’s a terrific productivity tool that helps streamline the process for essential docs, either for your team or clients.

You may rapidly create a new doc from available templates and see what’s happening with it. The technology also includes the complete team in the design and review process. Create proposals, quotes, contracts, and any other form of document. Integrations with other apps are possible for speedier data collection.

• Content Snare

Content Snare is a blend of email, chat, and documentation, and it’s a platform for fast organized information acquisition. All it takes is for you to arrange what you need, issue a request, and wait for your clients to send the proper files while Content Snare reminds them automatically what they should do.

You don’t have to request access, trade attachments, and scan email threads for information. Content Snare is your core platform for fast content collecting.

You can utilize templates to save time and repetition. Invite your team members to approve material, create requests and templates, and track due dates. Organize requests under projects and clients for a clear overview.

• Tallyfy

Tallyfy is an innovative alternative for folks who like to have things their way. It’s a web-based workflow program that instantly gives teams and their clients a beautiful screen to track all of their activities, typical business operations, and work progress.

Tallyfy is a tool that allows you to document and conduct many kinds of repeatable procedures. It enables you to define your team procedures in the mapping process, and it makes intentional business operations explicit activities that are easy to execute and alter.

Tallyfy is one of the greatest productivity tools since it enables you quickly develop, track, share, prioritize, and automate any decision-making process with a wonderfully simple yet powerful rules engine.

• Feedly

Feedly helps to stay up with the trends and subjects from your sector and areas of interest. It’s an online feed that allows you to organize and read all your trusted periodicals and blogs in one location.

Feedly employs Leo, an AI research assistant, to read your feeds and filter out the noise. Leo can offer you the best articles based on prioritizing specific keywords, trends, subjects, articles similar to your boards, and software vulnerabilities. The longer you use Feedly, the better Leo looks for the most relevant articles.

You may also use the app with your team to collaboratively research and share critical industry trends.

• Bear

Bear is a writing app for notes and prose on Apple devices. You may use it to compose everything from one-sentence notes to-do lists, and large essays.

The focus mode helps to concentrate, and the app includes themes, typography, and dark mode to modify the interface. There are hashtags, recognition of such elements as links, emails, addresses, colors, different export options, and more.

And Bear Pro enables you to encrypt notes or lock the app with the password or Face/Touch ID. Bear is a lightweight but powerful solution.

Check also the best note-taking apps for Android.

• Pocket

How often have you come across an article, news, or story that has inspired you and wanted to save, and come back to later? You can save all your favorite articles to Pocket and preserve them for subsequent reference.

It functions like a digital pocket or portfolio where you may keep all the material you uncover on the Internet.

Pocket Premium unlocks a permanent library for the articles and websites you save; provides you full-text, subject, tag, and author search to help you find exactly what you’re searching for; and delivers suggested tags that take the work out of organizing your list.

•  Grammarly

Grammarly is AI-powered online writing help. It helps to eliminate spelling and grammar issues as you write. It’s a terrific free productivity program since it helps to save energy and time on discovering faults, especially ones you wouldn’t be able to spot. And all your stuff is preserved in the app so you can always access it.

If you’d like more features like style, tone, and clarity improvements for writing, fluency checks, plagiarism detection, tone modifications, and more, the price starts from $11.66 per month.

You may also try the Hemingway App – an alternative for Grammarly for more sophisticated writers.

•  ProWritingAid

There is more to excellent writing than merely flawless grammar. Grammatically perfect sentences can still be confusing and awkward. Clear language, specific word choice and well-constructed sentences are essential to getting your idea across clearly.

You and your workers are full of writing potential. Even the least confident writers can write interesting, professional documents with the correct tools. ProWritingAid helps your staff spot potentially embarrassing typos and invest in their writing skills. Its proposed enhancements, explanations, and videos help authors comprehend the “why” behind the changes they make.

And with its configurable style guide and text expander features, ProWritingAid guarantees that your brand identity remains consistent in every email, newsletter, note and press release.

Improve the strength, consistency, and accuracy and start making genuine connections with your clientele.

Planning and organization are crucial in being productive, and they might aid you in building time management abilities. You can also structure workflow for your team.

• Calendly
• Calendly is one of the most popular productivity tools for planning. It offers everything you need to plan a meeting, video or phone chat, and any other event.
• Calendly allows your website visitors to plan a meeting or book a demo to chat with your salesperson. We use it at TimeCamp successfully, and it helps us and our clients connect swiftly
• Calendly works with your calendar to automatically check availability. You can set numerous types of meetings – one-on-one, teams, groups, etc. for different types of events. It features notifications, customization, and time zone identification. Its website embeds for scheduling directly from your website. Calendly also connects with other apps.

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