21 Best Business Management Software Tools for Small Business

Working in a small business is unlike anything else. It doesn’t matter if you’re the owner or another member of the team, you’re guaranteed to wear multiple hats regardless of your role. Whether that means taking on additional sales or operations responsibilities if you’re a marketer, or trying to do a little bit of everything if you’re the owner, 24 hours is never enough time in a single day. But how do you get more time out of your day? By using small business tools to make your processes more efficient. Below we review the best standalone and all in one business software.

Xero is an increasingly popular choice for online accounting. This 1CRM plugin enables straightforward integration between Xero and 1CRM. Once configured, it keeps the most important accounting entities in both systems in sync.

The integration synchronizes Accounts, Invoices, Bills, and Payments, with additional features in Tax Codes and Product Category modules. It supports multiple currencies (it’s standard in 1CRM), but in order to use it your Xero account must also support multi-currency, which their base-level service does not.

Some people may choose to completely outsource their accounting and use multiple apps to manage invoices and track expenses, but other small businesses will opt for QuickBooks or Xero. QuickBooks lets you email invoices and accept online payments, while also integrating with 3rd party apps like Square and Paypal. On top of that, you get complete payroll functionality, automatic cloud backups, and audit trails. QuickBooks has everything you need to properly manage your finances.

Invoicing, accounting and billing are essential business functions that should be managed well. FreshBooks is an easy-to-use, highly accessible and scalable cloud software that makes all these business functions simple, organized and professional-looking.

Everyone can benefit from task and project management apps, in business and in life! They help us to identify our goals, the steps we need to take to achieve them, and track them in a clear and manageable way. Having all of the information together helps us be more productive and further those goals too! Below, you’ll find a nice mix of task management/productivity tools for small businesses that help you get your job done.

Shift is the desktop app for streamlining your accounts, apps, and workflows. Tired of switching between accounts, and logging in and out? Shift is a logical & beautiful solution for managing everything better. Toggle between multiple Gmail, Outlook & Office 365 accounts without the hassle. Integrates with over 500 apps, including 1CRM! Making your work day that much easier!

Asana is a work-management app that changes the way people collaborate. You can use it as a simple to-do list, or as workflow-management tool, or as project management software. How you choose to implement Asana is up to you. The app lets you and your colleagues track work that needs to get done, see what everyone on the team is assigned to do, view the status of projects or ongoing work at a glance, and communicate with one another. All the information about the work itself is in one place.

Basecamp is the gold standard for managing projects, working with clients, coordinating with contractors, and communicating with your team. Using Basecamp means you don’t need Slack, Asana, Trello, Jira, Dropbox, Email, or some other messy jumble of products. Simplify and centralize around Basecamp instead. It’s time to change lanes, pass the slow traffic, and join all the companies that have switched to Basecamp, the more coherent way to work.

If you’re new to Things, this is the basic workflow:

1. Collect Your Thoughts

Get things off your mind quickly with Things’ action extension – it lets you create to-dos from other apps. Or just talk to Siri on any device (“Remind me to…”) and import from Reminders.

2. Get Organized

Create a project for each of your goals, then add the steps to reach them. For clarity, add structure with headings. Then group your projects by areas of responsibility, such as “Family”, “Work”, or “Health”. Review these regularly to stay on top of things.

3. Plan Your Time

See your calendar events alongside your to-dos and plan your time effectively. Create repeating to-dos for things you do every few days, weeks, or months – Things will remind you on the right day.

4. Make the Most of Your Day

Every morning, grab a coffee and prepare your list for “Today”: review previously planned to-dos and make quick decisions on what to tackle. Pick some more steps from your projects and then get going. The Today list is the only place you’ll need to look for the rest of the day.

5. Customize Your Workflow

Use tags to categorize your to-dos or add context. For example, tag places like “Office” or “Home”, or tag all your “Errands”, or everything you’re working on with “Kate”. You can easily find everything you’ve tagged via filtering or search.

Regardless of business size, one of the most common problems is always communication. With all of the communications solutions on the market, the problem usually stems from adoption. Below’s a list of some of the best communication tools for small businesses that are incredibly easy to adopt.

One of the new players on the communication market, Slack helps unify all of your messages and files into a single, good looking location. One of the great things is the unification of notifications, all requests, errors, and tasks exist in Slack providing everyone with a clear view of what’s going on in everybody’s world. And of course when it comes to driving adoption of communication platforms, mobile is a must. Slack does not disappoint here, as it has complete synchronization across mobile, web and desktop.

This one is a no brainer. Screen sharing, chat, and phone calls make this a must for small businesses, especially those with remote workers. A Skype mobile app makes it an even better option to make sure you’re in constant communication with your employees or coworkers.

Dial calls from 1CRM in a single click

Call your leads and customers from within 1CRM simply by clicking on a phone number anywhere in the system.

Screen pop-ups for Incoming calls

Receive screen pop-ups for incoming calls to know who is calling you. With contextual access to the contacts’ history and detailed information from these pop-ups, you can be more prepared to take the call and ensure quality interactions.

Automatic call logging

Automatically log incoming and outgoing calls to client history with call time, date, duration and your notes.

This for those large presentation meetings. I’ve used everything from ClearSlide to Join.Me to Webex, but I have always been a little particular to GoToMeeting. However, everyone has their own preference here, but it’s important to at least have one of these solutions ready for those moments you have to host presentation style meetings that are too intense for Skype to handle.

Zendesk is a cloud-based help desk management solution offering customizable tools to build customer service portal, knowledge base and online communities. The solution offers a customizable front-end portal, live chat features and integration with applications like Salesforce and Google Analytics. Zendesk’s online customer portal helps support agents to keep track of tickets raised and their status.

Hootsuite helps you to use the social web to execute marketing campaigns, spot and grow your audience, and send them targeted messages via multiple channels. Your team can utilize its social media dashboard to collaboratively schedule posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and other popular social sites via desktop, web, and mobile platforms. In addition, you can easily track industry trends and campaign results to tweak your strategies as you go.

The Hootsuite dashboard has tabs that organize all the social profiles that you link with the application. Today, many businesses use their social profiles to provide customer support, offer personalized deals to followers, and motivate them to become repeat buyers of their products or services. Such companies can utilize Hootsuite to effortlessly manage multiple social profiles simultaneously. With the premium plans, you get advanced features such as security, team collaboration, audience engagement, and social analytics.

Most businesses need to share files every day, with clients and co-workers. You need a system where all your files are easy to find, secure, and presented in an orderly fashion. Here are some of the best File Management & File Sharing apps! (You can also store files on 1CRM, attaching them to specific contacts or accounts!).

1CRM includes integration with the Dropbox online storage system. When composing an email, you can easily attach documents from Dropbox to your email. As well, backups of your entire 1CRM system, both software and data, can be automatically saved on a regular schedule to Dropbox. And if needed, those Dropbox backups may be used to restore your 1CRM system onto their original server, or another server.

Users of Google Docs can import, create, edit and update documents and spreadsheets in various fonts and file formats, combining text with formulas, lists, tables and images. Google Docs is compatible with most presentation software and word processor applications. Work can be published as a Web page or as a print-ready manuscript. Users can control who sees their work. Google Docs is ideal for publishing within an enterprise, maintaining blogs or composing work for viewing by the general public.

Picture a black box that plugs into the wall. Plug it in, turn on the switch, and qualified leads with an interaction history are automatically added into your 1CRM system – day in and day out – while the system is running. You’ll also get charts and feedback on which messages clients respond to best, so that the ‘machine’ can just get more and more effective over time.

Lead Guerrilla is a control panel for your brand’s marketing efforts, organizing your website, social media, text and email communications into a single, intuitive Marketing Automation system.

For small businesses and startups, Constant Contact is a great option. It is a cost effective tool with a very flexible pricing setup where the rates are based on the number of email contacts. But what makes it really special is that they strive to provide the extra effort to help their users become more proficient with the system by conducting live webinars, classes, and day-long courses.

The app makes it easy for businesses and individuals to gather contacts from across different databases and corral them into a unified list without breaking a sweat. Whether you are importing contacts from Gmail, Outlook or uploading a spreadsheet, Constant Contact makes it happen.

The platform also comes with hundreds of email templates that are beautifully designed so that you don’t have to waste your time building one from the ground up. Constant Contact also has a selection of awesome event management tools, social media campaign manual and features, and access to comprehensive learning materials.

Numerous email marketing applications exist for small businesses, but MailChimp is pretty special. It’s simple to use, comes with a nice set of templates, and even has a cool monkey mascot. What more could you ask for? For starters, A|B testing, simple reports, and workflow automation are all included as well.

Yes, yes it’s our product. But it’s also the most powerful and feature-rich all in one small business software platform for the price, offering boatloads of value. More than just a CRM, 1CRM helps you manage your entire sales pipeline, contact lists, marketing campaigns, and even has built-in project management and order management. This means you can just use a single, all in one business management software rather than purchasing multiple products for CRM, project management, and invoicing. Best of all, you can’t beat the $8/user/month entry point for the functionality you get in return. You can get a free trial of 1CRM here.

WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. Get the WordPress Lead Capture Plugin for 1CRM.

Discover our 1CRM Customer-Connection for WordPress plugin!

WooCommerce has become the most popular online shop system in the world, and now 1CRM and WooCommerce have joined forces using an integration created by visual4 GmbH.

With this integration, your WooCommerce orders automatically are stored in 1CRM, alongside the customer information, your customers can see status changes to their order (that you do in 1CRM) in their order history in WordPress. Your products from 1CRM get synchronized to WooCommerce as soon, as you check “Available in Online Shop” and WooCommerce stock changes are reflected within 1CRM product reservations until you finally ship the products.