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Top 10 Free Business Tools Franchisees Will Love
These tools exist to make running your franchise a little bit easier.
There’s good news and there’s bad news when it comes to running your own business.
The bad news is that it requires a lot of detail-oriented drudgery to properly manage just about every aspect of your company’s day-to-day operations.
The good news is that there’s a wealth of cloud-based software and apps to help you stay on top and keep your business running smoothly. And the best part? They’re all free.
Here are 10 tools that can make running your franchise a little bit easier.
Wave
More than one million business owners trust Wave to track more than $60 billion in income and spending. Wave’s app suite includes solutions for invoicing, accounting, payroll and payments. It’s no surprise that their accounting tools are top performers: the accounting app is 100 percent free for entrepreneurs, freelancers and small businesses with nine employees or less.
Wave eliminates the need for manual entry; simply connect Wave to your bank account, PayPal account, or other sources of data. Transactions automatically appear in the accounting list. Quickly generate professional reports including balance sheets and sale tax reports. And since Wave’s tools work seamlessly together, Wave’s small business payroll with automatically sync with accounting.
Zenefits
Zenefits is an all-in-one free, cloud-based software platform that gives your team a single place to manage all HR needs, including benefits, compliance, and payroll. Keep your existing insurance plans, pricing, and carriers, or set up new benefits include FSA, HRA and commuter options in just minutes.
Manage workers’ comp and COBRA compliance, safeguard your business with property and casualty insurance and manage retirement plan benefits including matching 401K contributions. Zenefits puts all your benefits together, online and automated, making life easier for you and your employees.
Wrike
Wrike takes small businesses beyond traditional task and project management with a suite of features that makes team collaboration a piece of cake. Wrike combines project management with a real-time workspace for dynamic discussion and document sharing. Stay on track with a birds-eye-view of your team’s workload and deadlines. Set priorities and align your team members to work smarter (not harder)—whether they’re in the next cubicle or three time zones away.
Improve planning by tracking projects and ad hoc assignments all from one place. Even better, Wrike’s collaboration tools streamline communication and take project accountability to the next level so opportunities don’t slip through the cracks.
Toggl
Let’s face it: tracking billable hours can be a real pain, especially when you hop from one project to the next. With Toggl, you’ll get one-click time tracking so you never lose a minute of billable time. Organize time by projects or tags, color code projects for easy visual time tracking, set billable rates for different hours, and instantly get an overview of weekly/monthly productivity with the dashboard. Toggl was built specifically for project teams, so you at one glance you can quickly get an overview of your team’s performance.
Hootsuite
An oldie but a goodie, Hootsuite is a must for simplified social media management. Manage social networks, schedule messages, interact with your followers, and measure social media marketing ROI directly from a single dashboard. I’ve long been a fan of Hootsuite Pro, which is built specifically for small and medium businesses. Manage up to 100 social profiles and keep tabs on your efforts with up to 10 enhanced analytics reports so you know what to tweak for better performance.
The free option is feature packed, allowing you to organize projects, assign tasks and set priority levels to specific tasks. The reporting feature is on par with most project management tools and there are plenty of integration options, including Dropbox and Google Apps.
