With advanced technology within the reach of any company, the major challenge faced by entrepreneurs these days is to find, amid the numerous alternatives, the ones that really bring some contribution to the management of the business. There are many tools that promise to automate tasks, increase productivity and reduce costs. But in order to take advantage of all these benefits, companies need to know what deals they can actually adapt to their reality.
To help you with this mission, check out 5 tools that will assist you in managing your business.
Managing expenses
With the constant movement of employees to meet the demands of the business, managing expenses and reimbursements for travel, lodging and meals can become a complicated task. Programs like Expensify allow your company’s employees to register expenses to be approved through their mobile devices, according to rules and approvals streams created by your own Administrative Department. The tool is free and also allows scanning of receipts and invoices to reduce the volume of copies and prints.
Sharing files
Many companies are still evaluating the pros and cons of adopting cloud computing definitively in their operations. However, some immediate benefits of this tool can be used in your business. Dropbox, for example, is one of the most popular tools for storage and file sharing on the internet, reducing the need for data transfers by email or CDs and USB drives. With it, you can save, copy and edit files as if the employees were using the same computer. The software already has a business version that offers a thousand gigabyte of storage as well as management and security solutions to specific business requirements.
Monitoring systems
The fact of staying a long time outside the company can be a challenge for managers responsible for IT and Telecommunications systems, who need to ensure the availability of services without any downtime. When using a platform to monitor systems, however, these professionals can monitor the performance of all devices used by the company, allowing problems to be identified before they can even be detected by users. One solution is OpMon, a software that in addition to monitoring the availability of the IT infrastructure, enables the management of business indicators through dashboards. The free version allows you to monitor up to 10 devices and 100 services.
Organizing thoughts
How many times have you had to gather your team to propose ideas and solutions for the business? In these meetings, it is not unusual to occur focus loss due to the large number of people making suggestions and observations. MindMeister is a great tool to create mind maps, and to encourage brainstorming, planning and sharing, whether in meetings or on a daily basis. Maps help to give new direction to discussions, showing the problems under new optics and offering a visual support to the ideas that are only in our thoughts.
BI on the road
In a time of uninterrupted connection to the internet, mission critical decisions can be taken in locations as varied as a restaurant or in your own living room. In this scenario, a Business Intelligence tool that can be accessed on tablets and smartphones is a great advantage. One of most known solutions of the market is QlikView. With it, you can see real-time information about sales and market projections, supporting decision-making at any time and increasing productivity outside the office. A quick query on the internet is enough to realize that the technologies that can help companies in their everyday business are just a few clicks away.
