While everyone faced the wrath of COVID-19 induced lockdown, small business owners were the ones that experienced severe monetary and economic aftermath of the lockdown.
Even today, one pain point that keeps popping up and down is finding ways to streamline your business to keep growing.
Thankfully, we live in the digital age, where small business owners have access to thousands of game-changing business applications and SaaS software. But choosing software that impacts your bottom line can be like finding a needle in the haystack – difficult and extremely time-consuming.
That's why to make your life easier, we've listed some useful SaaS software that are a must in the tech stack of a small business.
Top 6 SaaS Software for Small Businesses
Choosing the right software stack is important because it lets you switch the high cost of operating a business with increased customer value. Here are the top six tools to consider before finalizing your digital toolkit.
Productivity software
Stop wasting precious time on meetings. Work smarter. Get organized. Collaborate effectively with team members. You've probably heard this advice tons of times, yet you cannot do anything about it. Advice on ensuring a productive business and workforce could fill libraries, but without any result.
That's where productivity software comes in. These tools are the best bet towards executing an overall business strategy without ever missing a deadline.
Packed with some great features, productivity software like Slite can help streamline workflows and ensure the smooth working of your small business.
From file sharing to project management to collaboration, Slite could change the productivity game even during unprecedented times like today. Using Slite, you give your team one place to share ideas, gain knowledge, and stay updated with the project's progress across space and time.
Using its intuitive platform, you can spread important documents like project proposals, software documentation, and project scope to your team members, understand the team's progress and give feedback to move your project to the next phase.
Apart from working as a platform for sharing and team collaboration, Slite provides a software documentation template, project status report template, and project roadmap template, among hundreds of other important templates.
These templates encourage efficiency and repeatability because you no longer waste valuable time and money writing reports and documentation from scratch. Just pick a template from Slite and fill it!
One more reason to choose this tool: The average worker is productive only for two hours and 53 minutes out of the eight working hours.
Infographic maker
Does your business have a lot of data to present? But you don't have the slightest idea of using this information data to grow your business?
Everything boils down to how to create content that becomes strong lead magnets for your business? Simple! Turn this data into attractive infographics and use it as a part of your content marketing strategy.
That's where an infographic maker comes to your rescue.
An infographic maker tool like Piktochart is a lifesaver as it empowers you to transform mountains of inscrutable data into meaningful and attractive, easy-to-read visuals. Using software for creating infographics removes the legwork from designing an infographic because Piktochart provides some amazing and easy-to-customize templates.
Apart from more than 600 customizable templates, interactive charts, and maps, you can design infographics in a blink of an eye. You just have to add content to create an infographic that readers will click and read.
Interestingly, it allows you to export all visuals in PNG, PPT, and PDF format, thereby empowering you to use the infographics for various purposes.
Given that infographics are an art form, Piktochart is a great way to get a grip of the platform.
One more reason to use this tool: Human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text.
Accounting software
Handling daily accounting needs when your business is growing can be an uphill battle, especially if you're someone who loathes numbers. Also, business growth makes financial data more complex, and it becomes confusing and time-consuming to manage accounts on a spreadsheet.
Tools like QuickBooks Online can come to your rescue. Using accounting software can reduce manual intervention and increase accuracy. Apart from offering a first-rate suite of capabilities, the software provides 24/7 chat support and receipt capture.
Integration with Paypal, Shopify, and Square makes it an excellent tool for small businesses. From accounting and inventory management to payroll and live bookkeeping, QuickBook Online covers all your accounting needs.
It allows small businesses to send invoices, track income, run reports, receive payments, track sales capture and organize reports and send estimates.
Businesses looking to streamline their accounting process while ensuring optimum business growth require accounting software.
One more reason to use this tool: 60% of small business owners aren't confident in accounting and finance.
Uptime monitoring software
For a small business, there is nothing worse than losing online customers due to slow websites. Uptime issues within your network drive away potential customers, and if such instances are regular, you may lose a lot of website traffic.
So, to prevent such mishaps from occurring, small business owners can invest in network uptime monitoring software. A network uptime tool is designed to give deep insights into your network's uptime statistics, and this data can help you address website downtime issues before customers realize it.
Tools like SolarWinds ipMonitor provide alerts, reports, and notifications informing you about network uptime statistics. This ensures rapid problem detection and solving at your end. SolarWinds ipMonitor can provide services up to 2500 monitors, including applications, VMware, and servers.
You can reduce downtime with centralized monitoring, ensuring that no customers leave your website because your website is down or slow to load.
One more reason to use this tool: Frequent downtime can affect your website's ranking on the SERPs.
Project communication software
Though every project is unique and has a different set of individual circumstances that dictate the form of communication that works best, the goal of every project is the same – help everyone on the team make intelligent business decisions. And, this is possible when you foster a culture of communication. Decisions require open channels of communication so information can flow in and out from all directions.
That's why small businesses rely heavily on project communication software like ProofHub. It's an all-in-one project communication tool that helps in simplifying collaborative team projects.
From managing tasks to accurately monitoring project flow to creating team calendars, this intuitive tool creates async discussion boards and real-time chats that facilitate an environment of communication.
ProofHub uses Kanban-style task management to track projects and team productivity. Also, unlike most communication tools, ProofHub allows you to set a language of your preference and communicate with your team and client using that language.
It's a tool that streamlines communication and helps your team get rid of long and messy threads.
One more reason to use this tool: 86% of employees cite lack of communication as the main reason for workplace failure.
Video creation software
The monumental rise of TikTok showed the world what videos are capable of achieving. Today, with customers preferring videos over text and images, investing in video marketing could help your small business scale up. It's slowly becoming an effective and fast route to reach new customers.
If you're still considering video a priority of your marketing strategy, it's probably the right time to catch up on what your competitors are doing.
Video creation software like VideoScribe is a great way to create videos that convey a story and capture your target audience's interest. Using VideoScribe, create attractive whiteboard videos and use their drag and drop feature to build content pieces that create an emotional connection with your target audience.