When we founded Digital Menta , one of the main challenges we had was to equip us with tools to have an efficient company in terms of the management of all the internal processes of the company. This article we recommend reading to any SME that is starting because we believe that it can be of great help and reduce the time of selection of the different tools that need. I wish someone had given us these advice.
For the selection of the tools we had mainly two premises:
Then we list all those tools that we use today with their pros and cons.
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Google Tool Suite of mail, office automation and Google storage. Accessible from desktop and mobile in a very comfortable and simple way, for us at first instance was a very clear decision. The only downside we see to the suite is that many employees are used to work with Outlook for email management, so they may feel a little uncomfortable at first using the tool. The price is around 40€ per user a year in basic US version.
Asana It is a tool that we use for the management of projects of all kinds. From web design and development projects to advertising account management projects. It is a convenient and easy to use tool that allows you to create ongoing tasks, copy whole projects, share tasks with other employees, chat by project, link documents to projects, etc…
In addition to all its advantages, it has many very useful integrations. We use two: Instagantt, to have a visualization of the projects at the level of Gantt charts and Everhour to control the time that we dedicate to each project, client and to make analysis of profitability.
The biggest drawback is that we cannot link it to billing aspects to directly analyze the profitability of the projects. However it is free up to 15 employees, so we recommend it to any SME.
Everhour It is a tool that allows to control the time that is dedicated to each project in a very comfortable and simple way and that allows the integration with Asana.
To count the time that is dedicated to each client, either from the Asana interface or through a plugin in chrome, we can activate the timer and disable it once the task ends.
Until recently it was a free tool, and they made it pay recently. In our case we paid $39 but it gives us a lot of agility to do analysis of profitability and to know if we are offering to each client the best service possible. A big disadvantage again is that it is not related to billing aspects so we can not do analysis directly.
Billing in the multi-currency cloud. Zoho Invoice It is a tool of the Zoho group of tools. It costs $15 a month and we select it because it allows the issuance of invoices in multicurrency and recurring way, greatly facilitating our invoice management. In this space we saw many tools for SMEs very useful, however we selected this since currently 55% of our turnover is international.
One of the first things we learned when we started working is that the paper is really expendable for almost most of the tasks that are done. Many people print all kinds of documents by custom, but they really don’t need to. In our company we grieve we use Office paper. Digisigner It is a tool that centralizes the management of legal documents and allows to send documents to sign to any collaborator, company or employee. It is free up to 5 documents per month and costs $8 if we have broader needs.
Our scanning tool. Camscanner It is an app for both Android and iOS that allows you to scan documents emulating an on-board scanner. Simply taking a photo and with a few simple adjustments, we will have digitized documents on paper for sending by email or for archiving them in a digital way.
Bitrix24 It’s a great tool for customer portfolio management. We basically use it for the management of prospects and sales processes and we think one of the best we have seen (Pipedrive was our other finalist). Bitrix24 has many functionalities related to the day to day of the company: task management, task management of customer support teams, integration with billing, video calls, RR. hh., etc…
One of the main advantages is that it is free at its most basic level offering a very high functionality.
It is obviously not perfect, and it has shortcomings that do not allow us to use it for other administration functions that we have found in other tools.
Check, formerly called E-conomic is our last acquisition. It is a tool that allows to carry out accounting according to the needs that the Spanish hacienda imposes, also in the cloud. It Does not require any type of software installation and its prices start from 10 €/month for freelancers.
Thanks to the use of all these tools, many of the processes that in some SMEs, or are not controlled or controlled in a much more manual way, we manage to reduce the management times of the tasks that are not the center of our business, being able to focus on Greater measure in offering better service to our clients and develop our company.
If you want to know how to increase the productivity or efficiency of AdWords advertising management processes You can read this post about the Adwords Editor in its new version.
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