The best business platforms and online tools will boost your team’s productivity and efficiency, meaning that you and your staff can get more done in less time. The six platforms listed below have the potential to make your working life run like a well-oiled machine!
Trello
Trello is a one-stop organization shop that makes creating and managing projects a breeze. The platform allows project managers to set up boards and workspaces to divide a project into easily managed components, so that all team members – working anywhere in the world – can see, for example, which tasks are currently being undertaken, and the progression of each.
Users of Trello frequently rate its flexibility and user-friendly credentials as big plus points. The highly visual nature of the platform is also widely endorsed as being an effective way to stay on track and increase general productivity. And using this collaboration platform is free, too, although a premium upgrade is available with a tiered pricing system.
Insperity
This platform is designed to offer a full online HR solution and can help make a business’ payroll, compliance and performance management processes run much more smoothly. Customers can choose to purchase individual services or Insperity’s full-service solution. The latter provides fully integrated HR software, access to payroll and HR services, and tools to manage employee benefits plans: click for the full range of support the platform offers in this regard and for more details on the individual services available.
Users of Insperity point to the accessibility and usability of this platform and the comprehensive nature of the online training provided, as well as the high-quality nature of the software add-ons offered. For medium to large businesses, or businesses that want to grow, this platform could be the perfect solution for HR management.
Box
Box offers users secure cloud storage that can be accessed anywhere as well as documents, photos, videos, and design files can also be stored and shared, allowing for easy collaboration while negating issues around version control.
Box’s storage facility’s space, security, and durability are largely viewed as being best in class, with 75% of the companies making up the Fortune 500 using this platform to store and share their data. As well as storage, Box offers users several features that allow for collaboration, the creation of workflows, and full integration with other applications and tools.
The basic package is free, although it limits users to 10GB of cloud storage; beyond this, there are a variety of paid packages to choose from.
FreshBooks
FreshBooks offers an accounting solution for all types of businesses. Use this software to create invoices, manage and organize expenses, and log hours worked with a time tracking feature. This tool also supports effective team collaboration by keeping files, feedback, and conversation in one place and can generate easy-to-understand reports that also contain all the information that your accountant will require.
The accountancy support that FreshBooks provides is particularly useful: the automatic checks that the software runs on the figures entered helps to ensure compliance while the financial information provided by this tool is helpful to get to the bottom of the balance sheet and understand exactly what the figures mean for your business. The mobile app allows you to keep connected with your team and clients and manage your accounting from anywhere in the world, too!
Mailchimp
This all-in-one marketing platform allows businesses to easily manage their mailing lists and helps to create effective marketing campaigns and build newsletters. Mailchimp features an invaluable reporting tool that covers client details, social media usage information, and geo-tracking facilities, and it can fully integrate with Google Analytics.
Access to the majority of this platform’s tools is available on their free plan, which lets businesses send up to 10,000 emails to 2000 subscribers each month – if greater capacity than this is required, paid plans are available on a tiered basis. New features now also allow for eCommerce through this platform, making it even more useful.
This platform is known for being easy to use and feature-rich. It offers scheduling, list segmentation, and reporting tools, and its customer service provision is second to none.
ProofHub
Perfect for project managers, ProofHub allows for efficient planning, collaboration, and organization at all stages of the project lifecycle. This software features Kanban boards, making task management simple: the team can view, at a glance, what tasks have been done and which remain outstanding, and their level of priority. Gantt charts are included, too, which let you see the amount of work remaining to be undertaken on each of the project’s composite tasks as well as interrogating task dependencies.
ProofHub offers many communication tools to enable more effective collaboration between teams and individual colleagues: these include chat and mention features, a central announcement hub, and an email-in feature that facilitates discussion, the uploading of files, and the adding of tasks.
Further advantages of ProofHub are its integrated calendar, file version control, storage, and project templates. Workload reports can also be easily generated, and both automatic and manual timesheets are available to use, which are helpful in working out billable hours.
