A Quick Guide to Small Business Tools

Starting your own business can be overwhelming. With so many resources and tools out there, you may not even know where to start, let alone how to grow your business. Here at Check Stub Maker, we want this transition for you to be manageable, uncomplicated and mapped out for you. This is why we have created a guide to small business tools in an easy and simplified resource that you can refer back to you as you construct your business structure and create the right strategy to grow your business.

How to Calculate which Tools you should use first

Before we begin with the list of small business tools, it's important to figure out exactly where your business is right now — primarily so that you can measure from where you began, and then track your success going forward. Here are some ways to assess this:

• Establish your current challenges and which steps you think would resolve those challenges.
• Set a time that you wish those current challenges are resolved. For example, immediately, 5 years, when we have x amount of profit, etc.
• Acknowledge your stakeholders who should weigh in on that.
• Prioritize each challenge based off of which needs to be completed first
• Research services for small businesses and tools that could potentially resolve your challenges.

Going forward, here are some business management tools that could resolve your key challenges with growing your company.

Advertising

An important aspect of growing your company is advertising. When people think of advertising, they usually think about ads on TV, billboards, and ads in magazines. And I’m sure as a small business owner, you’re probably thinking, advertising is expensive! However, with the revolution of the internet, you can get the word out about your business with programs and software that are free that can increase your company and brand’s visibility.

Analytics

If you have a website for your company, then it’s important to recognize and measure which of your marketing efforts convert in generating your Return on Investment (ROI) or other results or KPIs you are looking to track. There are free and paid options that can measure how many people are looking at your website, and all data about your web traffic.

Social Media

If you’re not on social media, does your company even exist? The reality is that every business owner should be on social media. Social Media helps highlight your mission and the services that you provide, but in a personal and captivating way. Just having a Facebook Business Page for your company is not enough. You should be on the most popular social media sites where your target audience can be found and have engaging content that makes users want to follow your page. Tracking social media allows you to directly listen to your customers and see their behaviors, opinions, and attitudes. To create engaging and compelling content, you need a variety of tools that can save you time and resources.

There are free online tools where you can create a visually appealing presence and use storytelling to relate to your customers. You can create pre-formatted templates for social media posts, banners, online flyers, and graphics. If you don’t have a professional photographer, you can get free stock images online for your social media efforts, marketing campaigns, and website design as well!

Accounting

Keeping track of revenue and business expenses is imperative so that you can effectively run your business in a way that minimizes mistakes, understanding the right course of action regarding additional employees, investing and budget.

Tracking finances can actually be a challenge. Logging inventory, managing invoices and record tracking can be mundane and tedious. Luckily there are tons of tools that do it for you and give real numbers in real-time.

Scheduling

If you have employees and/or business hours it’s important to keep track, manage and create schedules so that everyone is on the same page and employees can coordinate availability, meetings, and conference calls on one easy site or app. Research options for you and your company that fit best within your budget and needs so that you can spend less time tracking and managing people’s schedules and more time on things that take higher priority like growing your business.

Communication

Just like scheduling, communication is important to be a successful team or company. Phone calls and text messages can get lost or intertwined with your individual and not work-related communication. Finding a small business tool that allows communication on either an app or online service is a great way to stay organized.

Productivity

With a huge to-do list of things to do for your employees or for yourself, it can get complex to be productive on a day to day basis. There are services for small businesses that track productivity and help coordinate day to day objectives and tasks so you can enhance your employee's experience and stay on route for the results that you need.

Calendar Management

Planning can propel your business forward. With a Calender tool, you can have a big picture in mind for you and your team and creates a visual synopsis of what tasks are being completed in order to measure and complete your goals and objectives. A calendar tool helps you feature and build a plan that has a deadline.

Pay Stub Software

A huge aspect of having a productive and successful company is through your business management tools, and creating a payroll is a vital aspect of your success. You want to ensure that your employees are getting paid on time while being compliant with your employment agreement and federal and state tax regulations. Trying to calculate this twice a month or however frequent you pay your employees can be strenuous. With Checkstubs easy software , our templates calculate all the math for you at a reasonable and great price.

We have the best online pay stub software so you can preview your pay stubs before you actually purchase them. The details are important to you, so we’ve made sure that you can add your company logo at the top of each pay stub and give you the flexibility to put in information based on salary or hourly and many other options! Once you’ve purchased the pay stub, we sent you a PDF copy emailed right to you.

There are tons of resources and business management tools online that you can use that will help your business succeed and grow. The most important thing is to address your goals, prioritize them and then find the small business tools that will achieve your goals. You can rest easy knowing where to start. Here at Checkstubmaker, we want to help you in that process.