If you want to ensure your company is as lean and productive as possible in 2023, then trying out one or more of the many available business apps designed to help you do just that is a great place to start.
Each of the apps we list below has been hand-picked for the benefits they can deliver. As well as saving your business money, they can offer benefits as far-reaching as ensuring compliance, boosting collaborative processes, and disaster-protecting your company data.
Best for Team Chat: Spike
Spike is an entirely new email proposition, fusing the traditional functionality of email messaging with the naturalness and ease of a chat app. This has many benefits: chat threads are easy to join and follow - they don’t feature all the annoying screen clutter of repeating signatures and headers - and users can switch seamlessly from chatting to voice messaging to video calling without the need to leave the app. This can work wonders for workflow and productivity and is a great way to keep your team connected and engaged.
Spike team chat also incorporates an advanced search tool, so employees can call up the message or information they need quickly and easily, and it facilitates audio messaging, too. This app is highly affordable and could well represent a saving compared to your current business email provider. It comes in at just $8 per month per account for businesses.
Best for Accounting: FreshBooks
This popular cloud-based accountancy platform can save you a serious amount of money in accountancy and staff costs and help ensure that you remain compliant - so there are lots of advantages to bringing this app on board.
As well as invoicing, time tracking, expense tracking, and reporting tools, FreshBooks also gives your business the option to accept credit card payments. It boasts a highly user-friendly interface, meaning you’ll be able to hit the ground running without needing to watch hours of training videos first.
There’s a basic free plan that’ll give you access to many features, while the paid plans expand on these, providing you with the ability to send proposals and recurring invoices and the option to issue payment reminders.
Best for Time Tracking: Connecteam
Payroll errors and time theft can put a significant dent in your business’s bottom line. An effective time-tracking app can provide a simple solution, and Connecteam is a great option. The app uses tagged GPS locations, breadcrumbs technology, and geofencing capabilities to ensure your employees are where they’re meant to be while clocked in.
Users can log in conveniently via their mobile devices, and you can chat with team members within the app itself. To add to the streamlining potential, Connecteam can integrate with several payroll platforms to easily process employee payments.
Connecteam offers a free tier, and its Basic Plan costs just $39, billed annually, and can accommodate up to fifty users.
Best for Project Management: Monday
A project management app is an effective means of saving your business money by streamlining and optimizing every element of your project and how it’s run. Monday is an easy-to-use app that’ll allow you to create a project, break it down into tasks and even further into steps, and delegate the work out to your team members.
This app is a useful way to boost collaboration, as tasks’ statuses can be updated in real-time and commented on by everyone. This allows potential logjams to be identified early, so you can take steps to resolve what would otherwise have been a time and money-draining delay.
Monday is an affordable option, with plans costed by the number of users. To give you an idea, it’s $29.99 a month for five users and $59.99 for up to ten users.
Best for Cloud Storage: IDrive
Fast, easy to use, and offering continuous syncing of your files, IDrive ranks as one of the best cloud storage solutions around. It features a web interface that supports file sharing via email, Facebook, and Twitter, and up to thirty different versions of all the files backed up to your IDrive account will be saved. So no worries if you’ve accidentally deleted something important!
This app also offers IDrive Express: users signing up for this plan will receive a physical hard drive if a disaster strikes meaning you lose all your data, so you can quickly restore all your backed-up files. IDrive business plans are available for $99.50 a year for 250GB of data.
The Takeaway
If you’re thinking about ways to save your company money in 2023, the apps above could be a great place to start! Each of the options listed can boost productivity and efficiency and help you streamline your processes - all of which are likely to have a positive impact on your company’s bottom line.
Why not try out one of the free trials or basic tiers of one or more of these apps to see how well they suit your business and to get an idea of their benefits? You may be surprised at just how much of a difference you’ll see.
