5 Online Tools for Small Business

The biggest challenge facing many business owners is time. In an ideal world, every business would have a secretary, an accountant, a human resources person, a contract specialist and a project manager. In the real world, those are just a few of the hats a small business owner wears each day. Fortunately, there are fast, easy and affordable online tools to complete these time consuming tasks in a few minutes each.

EchoSign: Thousands of big companies use electronic signatures to get contracts signed. If you hate printing and then scanning agreements to email them back, if your filing system is a box under your desk, then you’ll love the simple yet powerful contact management and electronic signature service offered by EchoSign.

Efax: Do you find sending a fax a pain? Maybe you haven’t owned a fax machine for years. Still, business still occasionally demands faxing a document. When that happens, a fax to email service is the answer and Efax delivers for a price that is hard to beat… Free

Freshbooks: Accounting software tends to have a relatively steep adoption curve. The small business accounting software solution from Freshbooks is easy to use and keeps a complete copy of all your crucial billing information online, making it easy to create new invoices or track down old ones from the road. The monthly charge is more expensive than Quickbooks or other desktop software, but Freshbooks makes it easy to setup repeat billing and sends the invoices automatically each month. That feature alone is worth the $14/month it costs.

PayCycle: Payroll is another one of those tasks that takes a lot of time and creates lots of stress. Have you filed your payroll taxes this month? Did you fill the form out correctly? How about calculating the withholding? Keep track of all the payroll rules is a full time job, so if you don’t have time to do that s**t, try Intuit’s online payroll software and you never have to think about it again.

Special bonus feature, PayCycle includes direct deposit, so you can pay your contractors immediately without having to address an envelop, find a stamp or loosing track of it for another day. Paycycle.com makes payroll as easy as online banking makes paying your bills.

InfoStreet: Managing day-to-day business activity like email, to do’s, group calendars, appointments, team meetings, files, clients and so on is not fun, but it is essential for business productivity. InfoStreet offers easy to use intranet applications for as little as $10/ month. Their integrated project management and CRM software for small business is a little more complex than some alternatives, but the features are very robust.

None of these tools will make it rain, deliver products to your customer’s door, execute on your business plan or cover for you while you take that much needed vacation, but they will save you an hour a day and let you spend your time on what’s important…Growing your business.