With more and more employees expecting remote working, hot desking and an actual work/life balance, SMEs find themselves needing tools powerful enough for workers to get business done before they clock off.
There are plenty of well-known tools out there that you’re probably already using, but which ones could complement or even replace your existing apps?
And – more importantly – which ones are exciting enough to make employees actually want to use them?
From general productivity to workflow management and data insights, here’s our pick of the latest and greatest apps and programs that will take your SME to new heights.
TrafficLIVE
TrafficLIVE is a great little client relationship management, time keeping and money crunching tool.
TrafficLIVE allows you to take control of your client relationships by seamlessly delegating and recording employees’ hours combined with tracking tasks and resources to make sure you deliver work on time and within budget.
With constant profitability updates and real-time control over cash flow, TrafficLIVE promises you’ll be able to proactively keep clients happy whilst freeing up more of your time to just do your thing.
Sounds like a win-win to us.
Workflow
Workflow is an app for iOS that allows you to automate a whole bunch of boring and time draining tasks with one quick tap of a button.
Choose from over 200 actions across a bucket-load of apps to create ‘recipes’ that will make your life easier – like finding the nearest coffee shop, or scraping all the images from a web page.
General productivity apps like this are a God-send to virtual assistants, project managers and managing directors alike.
Roambi
Roambi takes data from all your favourite business intelligence tools – from Excel and Salesforce to Microsoft Reporting and Analysis Services – and transfers it all on an iPad or iPhone for your viewing pleasure.
It’s got interactive navigation, it’s got jazzy visuals and it’s got spot on analytics; in a nutshell, Roambi makes your never-ending streams of data the easiest to understand and the most engaging they’ve ever been.
Mavenlink
Mavenlink’s project management software offers resource planning, project accounting, timeline charting tools and change tracking.
All sounds pretty standard, right? So what’s so great about Mavenlink that it made it on our list? We’ll tell you: Mavenlink’s Insights capabilities are, quite frankly, made by the Gods.
The software goes way beyond the usual humdrum business intelligence insights to give you an in-depth look into trends and issues affecting your business performance – all in real-time, so that you can turn things around super quickly.
In other words, one simple piece of software can tell you exactly what is happening in your business, why it’s happening and – for the incredibly busy among us – what you need to do about it.
FileMaker
Liking the sound of these tools but still looking for something a little more bespoke?
FileMaker is a powerful yet intuitive software platform that allows you to create completely custom, data-driven solutions across iPad, iPhone, Windows, Mac and the internet, all based on your business’ specific needs.
For example, if you’re an independent retailer you can pull all of your existing, fragmented data into FileMaker to track things like inventory, customers, store credit, ordering, buying, cataloguing and point of sale all in one place and available to you on the go.
There are literally too many possibilities to list here, but if you’re a growing business in need of something totally unique, then these are the guys for you.
Conclusion
If you run or work for an SME we think it is well worth checking out all of the tools in this list.
But this is really just the beginning; each and every business is so different, so if you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for in these tools there are tons of other great options out there.
Someone, somewhere, is bound to meet your particular needs – all you need to do is look.
