Best Tools For Small Businesses in 2021

Take a look at the tools that can be leveraged for the management of projects, teams, finance, and overall business operations for small and medium enterprises in 2021.

Best Tools for Small Businesses

One of the most difficult aspects of handling a small business is that you may have to handle more than one thing on your plate. Your responsibilities are not restricted simply to accounting and financial management. In handling a small enterprise, you may have to play multiple roles in product management, sales, finance, marketing, and more.

Moreover, the year 2020 has been quite difficult for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). A recent report suggests that 57% of SME leaders are struggling with their business. The pandemic has forced leaders to seek innovative solutions that cater to changing times. In this article, we discuss different tools that can be leveraged to better manage operations in finance, marketing, communication, and more in 2021.

Project Management Tools for Small Business

From a freelancer juggling with various contracts to small businesses handling multiple clients, you are bound to require project management tools that keep track of your tasks, assignments, deadlines, etc. Small businesses also require these tools to handle their team, resources, responsibilities, and track progress.

Trello is one of the tools that can help businesses manage their projects - from content development to tracking sales and assigning responsibilities to internal members. It also allows you to track progress, assign due dates, sort tasks based on different factors, assign labels as per priorities, etc. Alongside Trello, Evernote is another tool that helps you take notes and collaborate on notes with others.

Team Collaboration Tools

The pandemic has changed the relationship between work and offices. In 2021, a majority of small or medium enterprises manage their team remotely. Therefore it has become necessary to use tools that allow team members to communicate and collaborate with each other.

Slack is one of the softwares that facilitates remote team members to engage with different subjects. Teams can create channels depending upon different operations, upload files, and share relevant information across the team. To engage with team members over video calls for meetings, you can also consider using Zoom or Google Meet.

Designing Tools

While the world is increasingly moving towards a digital era, the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated this growth. Freelancers, eCommerce sellers, online shops, and SMEs have a more active online presence. User-friendly designing tools have become necessary to communicate and build a brand online.

Canva is one of the designing tools for small businesses, freelancers, and medium-sized enterprises to use for creating appealing designs. Moreover, it allows the creation of various graphics including social media posts, presentations, newsletters, logos, business cards, infographics, brochures, letterhead, and more.

Accounting and Legal Tools

If you are a small organization, it is highly likely that you are in charge of more than one business operation. Additionally, processes like accounting and legal are the basics of any organization. This raises the need to use tools that facilitate automation and easy management of accounting as well as legal activities.

Xero is one of the accounting tools that help companies monitor their accounts. Aimed for small businesses, it enables bookkeepers to maintain their balance sheets and cash flow in real-time.

Managing any scale of business requires deploying legal resources to ensure that operations function in a smooth manner. WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, is one of the instruments that you can leverage to ensure that company proprietaries including logos, business cards, taglines, etc are not trademarked by any other organization. DocuSign is another tool that streamlines legal operations including signing contracts and storing all agreements over the cloud.

Digital Marketing Tools

Whether you are a freelancer or an eCommerce store, projecting your skills and success is quite important. One of the best methods of showcasing your brand, as a freelancer or a small business, is through digital marketing. This has led to constant communication with your clients through social media, email, and website.

For planning your social media calendar, you can use tools such as Planable or Hootsuite. These tools allow you to plan your posts weeks in advance in one single stretch. Additionally, tools like MailChimp facilitate you to send newsletters, company updates, promo codes, and more through emails. You can also access MailChimp for analyzing your email marketing strategy. Widgets like Yoast facilitate you to create SEO-enabled content that drives organic traffic to your website. Other important tools include Hubspot, a CRM tool to manage your customer relationship.

Finance Tools

Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, chances are that your business is not merely restricted to local customers. In 2021, businesses have scaled to a global scale and online payments have become an integral part. As businesses are moving online, it has created a need to integrate payment page into your websites.

Additionally, it is also equally important to leverage tools that not only optimize your user experience but also facilitate faster payment processing, multiple payment methods, and lower transactional costs. XanPay is a payment solution that helps your business cater to overseas payments in a much faster, affordable, and customer optimized manner.

Small businesses can use XanPay to seamlessly expand into overseas markets without necessarily worrying about time, money, and resources. The integral features that businesses and users can access from XanPay include:

• Cross Border Payments - Using its advanced C2C technology and its network of liquidity providers, XanPay facilitates cross-border payments in a much more affordable and faster way.

• Local Payments - XanPay allows your overseas customer to pay in their local fiat currency while you, as a merchant, receive payments in your favorable currency directly into your bank account.

• Easy Onboarding - The payment solution provider allows easy access to its services with minimal requirements. The onboarding process generally takes not more than 3-5 days.

• Low Fees - Traditional finance service providers charge as high as 6.8% for cross border payments and additional charges with foreign exchange rates. XanPay charges a flat fee of 1.99% per transaction without any additional costs.

Bottom Line

Managing a small business or working as a freelancer in the gig economy is demanding as it requires you to handle multiple operations. The right tools are helpful for you to engage in a much more productive manner with minimal hassles. Moreover, the right tools enable the automation of activities and facilitate easy collaboration across your team as well as activities.