10 Best Apps to Grow Your Small Business in 2024

The advent of technology in every aspect of life has transformed the way consumers and businesses function. Time-saving, cost-efficient and convenient technological solutions are easing up lengthy and somehow boring tasks. From business management to unified workspaces, marketing, finance, networking and more – each business function now has dedicated apps for streamlined alternatives to the ways these were performed earlier. Especially, if you run a small business, it’s fascinating how you can do it all today with just one device - your smartphone. And in this blog, we will discuss the best X apps to grow a small business in 2024. Stick around for some astounding insights.

In this technology-driven world, growth can come at a significantly higher pace for your small business if you leverage the right solutions at the right time. Are you wondering how? On-ground, small businesses run the world. Over 90% of the business population belongs to small and medium businesses. But contrary to popular opinion, growing a business is not just about scaling up.

Suppose you run a digital marketing services agency, you cannot simply decide one day to reach out to more people, start tens of new projects and scale up the business. You would eventually run out of time, and resources and it won’t sustain even a month.

Growth is not a one-dimensional journey, it comes from better management, better work distribution, higher productivity, a talented team, a marketing plan and deep analysis of the market that you’re serving. So from a top-level view, businesses need to get more organized, manual mundane tasks need to be replaced with digital solutions wherever possible. Not to forget – as a number of organizations function remotely, efficiency becomes even more important. With the same objective, let’s now find out the top apps you would need to grow your small business seamlessly.

Types of Apps You Need to Grow your small business

1. Finance and Accounting Apps

One of the most critical parts of a business – accounting along with financial management should be digitized in order to streamline your business. Your company’s legal and finance health is directly dependent on how accurately and efficiently you maintain your books, accounting which becomes too complex if done manually throughout. From growth strategy to crucial financial decisions, your business’s trajectory is closely related to effective finance and accounting too. With cloud-based bookkeeping and accounting app solutions, numerous problems of accuracy, accessibility, convenience and cost-efficiency could be solved.

2. Payment Apps for Small Businesses

Cash payments are almost the least preferred mode of payment by a majority of consumers now. Hence, apps for managing payments received through credit, debit cards and other online modes are essential for any business. If you’re an online-only business, then it becomes even more important that you track all the payments, verify them and keep the records handy.

3. Time management apps

There’s a lot more businesses and individuals can accomplish provided they manage their time optimally. When done manually, it is effective to an extent but becomes difficult to maintain. Time management apps help in scheduling the work days right and improve productivity.

4. Workplace communication app

Workplace conversations need to be done on a dedicated professional platform rather than other casual conversation apps. These apps help in effective collaboration and especially in the case of remote teams – it is vital for the entire organization to use a common workplace communication app.

5. Job Posting Apps

Amidst the intensely competitive landscape right now, organizations are looking to hire fast and hire at scale. Recruiters are constantly sourcing and engaging candidates. One of the most convenient and efficient solutions for attracting numerous candidates to the open roles is through job posting apps.

6. Marketing Apps

Marketing, at its core, is all about experimentation. You need to track your campaigns and monitor their performance continuously. Marketing automation apps help you scale your growth efforts and give access to a birds-eye view of all the different channels, campaigns and their progress.

7. Design apps

Apps for designing creatives, company logos and social media posts are crucial for a business’s marketing efforts. Unlike a number of desktop software which require deep expertise to design graphics, mobile apps make the process a lot easier. With templates and a user-friendly interface, mobile apps for design have brought the much-needed convenience.

The 10 Best Apps for Small Business

We discussed various types of solutions that small enterprises need today for growing their overall business. Whether it is payments, finance management, marketing or any other part of the business – we have got you a curated list of the best apps to grow a small business.

#1 Fincent

Let’s get the priorities right – before growing your business, you need to get the financial systems in place. Fincent enables seamless financial management with a fast and easy-to-use solution. Here’s how the platform makes your financial management easier:

• Cloud-based Bookkeeping: The platform serves your small business with automated bookkeeping, which helps you stay up to date always, enables efficient management and allows you to collaborate with expert bookkeepers.
• **Financial & Accounting Statements: **Fincent also facilitates users with any time access to financial statements including profit & loss, balance sheet and cash flow statements. Hence, you can track and analyze your business’s status deeply any time.
• **Digital Bills, Receipts and Invoices in Cloud: With Fincent, **you no more need to search for invoices for hours. It helps you collaborate and share all the essential accounting files with the bookkeeper in a jiffy.
• **Monitor Your Transactions and Financial Health: **View and search all your transactions performed with different cards and through different accounts at one place. Keep track of your business’s financial capabilities with dedicated summary cards. Monitor insightful data with the help of numerous filters, so that you can act quickly on transactions that need the accountant’s attention.

#2 SAP SuccessFactors

One of the most popular business management apps, SAP SuccessFactors enables you to streamline workforce engagement and end-to-end HR activities. It acts as a central ground for all your workforce employees to connect and exchange important work information. Additionally, the platform also helps in ensuring that the same processes are being followed for accomplishing tasks throughout the organization. The features include self-service tools for HR, managers and employees.

The solution basically helps the entire workforce to stay aligned with their chores. By bridging the gap between strategy and execution, this tool helps in optimizing productivity.

Here are the key offerings of SAP Successfactors platform:

• Employee Data management
• Self-services like leave application approval for leads
• Payroll management
• Time management

The platform also has dashboard for managing:

• Employee benefits
• Support ticketing & issues resolution
• Health and well-being
• Protection and privacy
• Diversity and inclusion

#3 Square

For both online and offline small businesses, Square enables quick acceptance of different modes of payments ranging from credit cards and debit cards on phones. The app also allows for building of custom POS systems to facilitate fast and efficient transactions. Not to forget – easy online invoices, anytime access to live analytics, multi-location payments management and critical information depicting sales. As far as the capabilities are concerned, Square can help you:

• Payment acceptance: Through credit cards, debit cards, Google pay, Apple pay and more
• Payment protection: Dispute management
• **Offline Transactions: **Swiped card payments when the internet is unavailable.
• Reporting and insights: Dashboard for business insights
• Inventory management: Low-stock alerts
• Customer service: Customer directory
• E-commerce transactions plugin: Online ordering and payments

#4 Toggl

If you’re struggling with time management for your business, Toggl can surely help you deal with it. The tool enables you to track the time spent on different tasks and generate reports from the data. These reports are way more useful than you would imagine. From optimizing your time spent on numerous unproductive tasks to adjusting the project strategies after analyzing roadblocks.

And don’t worry about getting distracted – the app runs in the background and there’s no need to enter anything manually. The tool automatically detects your active applications and performs entries to your timesheet, hence helping you eliminate a majority of the hassle.

The core features of Toggle include:

• One-click timers
• Background tracking
• Calendar integrations
• Auto-tracker
• Favourite time entries

#5 Trello

Another globally popular project management tool, Trello enables users to organize their tasks under various lists and boards. It’s basically a collection of customizable and collaborative boards that you along with your teams can leverage to distribute, track and update sub-tasks that together form a project. This format of project management makes it a lot easier to divide the tasks yet to be done from those already completed.

The visual simplicity of the solution makes it stand out among a stream of online project management tools. Trello also offers a variety of integrations to further facilitate teams in automating repeated tasks. If all of the positives were not enough, Trello also allows you to get started for free. Some of the basic features of the tool include:

• **Boards: **The central location for lists and cards, usually used to store information of one entire project.
• **Lists: **Sub-folders under boards. Usually utilized for conveying timelines, phases of process or the workflow
• **Cards: **Cards are used to represent separate tasks, checklists, and steps in the process, brief attachments, etc. under lists.

Apart from these, **Labels, Checklists, Attachments, Card links, and Assignees **are some of the additional provisions Trello offers.

#6 Slack

One of the best apps to grow a small business, Slack is a well-organized and effective communication platform which converts interoffice team conversations into channels. Each of your business departments can have dedicated channels so that information never gets mixed up and critical links, and documents are easy to find.

The most common way businesses use slack is to create different channels for each of their business verticals like - recruitment, marketing, sales, product, tech and numerous other teams. Service-based businesses, on the other hand, form project-wise channels and they can even invite the clients’ points of contact to join the conversations.

Here’s how Slack streamlines work communication:

• Channel creation and collaboration with internal and external members
• Access to information around team’s availability
• Set reminders
• Voice and video call
• Workflow tools integration
• Channel privatization

#7 Hootsuite

Social media marketing and management get too time-consuming when done manually. The Hootsuite app enables users to quickly schedule and publish content across social channels, manage all social profiles from a single window, and track conversations and engagement. To sum up, you can schedule all your social media activities, well in advance rather than spending time on them every day. Take a look at what you can accomplish with Hootsuite:

• Create and schedule posts across all social platforms
• Manage your accounts with a single dashboard
• Strategize your upcoming campaigns
• Track incoming messages
• Analyze performance

#8 Canva

When it comes to graphic designing apps, Canva clearly tops the charts. For all the non-designers, it’s almost a hack – with thousands of categorized design templates, which make it amazingly easy to use and fast to design. 

No matter the requirement, from presentations to dedicated social posts, emails, website pages, posters and more – Canva offers immense flexibility and a variety of features for creating astounding designs.

#9 DocuSign

We are rapidly moving towards an entirely digital landscape of work, where all business operations are becoming paperless. DocuSign is one such app enabling this change through digital signatures. You can e-sign and share essential documents and can also ask other users by inviting them to eSign within the app. However, DocuSign is a lot more than just an e-signature tool, here are the powerful features it offers:

• Electronic Signature: Powerful way to send and sign
• **Electronic Notarization: **Share, sign and notarize agreements online
• Contract Lifecycle Management: Automated and systematic document workflows
• Document Generation: Generate documents from Salesforce
• **Identity Verification: **Innovative signer verification for your agreements

#10 Google Workspace

When talking about best apps to grow a small business – Google Workspace just cannot be missed out. It is a collection of the most important solutions you need afor your enterprise. While the personal plan of Google Suite is free, the company account offers more features including a bigger cloud storage.

• Google Meet

An online meeting tool which is daily easy to use for scheduling meetings. The best thing is, this also integrates to Google Calendar and reminds users of meetings helping them never miss one.

• Calendar

Google Calendar is much more than a static overview of days and months. It allows creating reminders for events, scheduling meetings on Google Meet, sync calendars with internal teams to find out availability of colleagues and much more.

• Docs

Alternative to MS Word, Google Docs is the most popular online document editor worldwide today. Document owners and added collaborators can write, design, share and work together on Google Docs with help of new-age features.

• Sheets

An online alternative to conventional Excel Sheets, Google Sheets is an excellent tool for organizing business plans and tasks, recording data and numerous other activities. Similar to Google Docs, the comprehensive collaboration makes Google Sheets a great option for teams.

Conclusion

Growing a small business can be a bit tricky. However, if coupled with the right systems to automate basic mundane tasks, and efficient tools that streamline the workflow – productivity can be improved. Digital solutions in the form of apps help small businesses grow beyond expectations. Automating the time-consuming mundane tasks helps businesses scale up seamlessly. Numerous apps that we discussed in this blog cater to critical business requirements. If strategically used, together these solutions would facilitate your business growth at large.

Fincent is a one-stop solution for bookkeeping services dedicated to small businesses. Finance, being one of the most intricate parts of your business, becomes too complicated at times. Our platform takes care of your bookkeeping, accounting and financial statements to help you focus on growth while we serve you a comprehensive overview of the overall financial health. Want to streamline your bookeeping and accounting? Start a free trial today.

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