IT Solutions and Your Small Business – Going from Overwhelm to Opportunity
As a small business owner, you know that there are a million apps out there that can help you. These include accounting, ERP, payroll, e-commerce, CRM, marketing, and POS business applications. In fact, never before have small businesses had so much access to affordable technologies that help them with tasks that used to require entire dedicated departments and hefty budgets.
However, as a small business owner, you also have a few constraints that make it difficult to take full advantage of these technologies. As a result, you may be using very few apps or even none at all. These constraints include:
Time constraints
while it’s wonderful that there are so many solutions out there now for small business owners, you still have very limited time. You cannot afford to try each and every solution out there to identify the ones worth working with. In addition, some of these apps require several months of regular use just to see them work their magic.
Budget constraints
Sure, there are lots of affordable and high-quality technologies out there that cost around $100 or much less per month. However, these monthly fees can add up quickly. Add in that you may need to sign up multiple users, or even that staff may inadvertently sign up again for a service already signed up for by another staff member. Sometimes it may seem a lot easier to not sign up for anything.
The “KISS” constraint
having fifty different apps violates the simple principle of KISS, or “Keep it Simple Stupid.” This principle in this context boils down to the following: the more complexity there is to manage, the less useful the system will become to you. You will have trouble keeping track of the different technologies and integrating together the data and insights you need from all of them to understand how to improve your business.
Now that we have taken a look at some of the reasons why getting started in putting together a technology suite as a small business owner can seem overwhelming, let’s talk about how you can take advantage of some of these amazing opportunities. Here are five tried and true technologies that are worth the time, cost, and additional managerial burden, to get you started if you have been shying away from taking advantage of the apps opportunity:
Quickbooks
This popular accounting software is built for small and medium-sized businesses and will help you easily track income, expenses, and more. You can even use QuickBooks to send customer invoices, and this software will help tremendously when it’s time to do taxes.
MailChimp
this email and marketing automation app helps you target and convert customers, and engage through written communications. It is especially small business friendly. It’s especially convenient how it is free when your mailing list is small and email send is low so that you can keep your budget down while you’re still in the early stages of customer acquisition.
Gusto
human resources can be a tricky field of landmines if you try to figure it out all yourself. Luckily, Gusto has all the payroll, benefits, time-tracking, and hiring tools that you need as a small business owner.
Stripe
this is one of the most reputable payment processing platforms. It allows you to accept payments, send payouts, and perform other related functions. Depending on your specific needs, you may like Stripe, or you may prefer competitors like PayPal and Square.
CreditPush
CreditPush has everything you need for the financial success of your small business. Improve your business’s financial health, boost your business credit score, access quality funding and more – all in one platform designed for small businesses. CreditPush is constantly coming up with new financial features, for instance, “Autopilot” with bank reconciliation automation. This is perfect for businesses that don’t use an accounting app yet but would like to. This feature can do bank reconciliation even using a completely new QuickBooks without any data.
CreditPush is especially great to use alongside whatever other apps you decide to add to your technology arsenal because CreditPush solves much of the “KISS” constraint. By allowing you to integrate into all of the other apps you use (165+ integrations), you will get timely data insights and analysis based on all of your apps, whenever you need it. This significantly decreases the managerial burden of all your app usage. Best of all, there’s no cost to use it. Get started here.
