How are you using technology to grow your business?
We use a ton of cloud based SaaS applications here at Pixily. We love these services, because they are either free or require a low monthly fee for use.
Zoho CRM – We switched from Salesforce recently because Zoho offers a lot of the same functionality at a lower price. It’s working well for us.
Freshbooks – This is one of the greatest online tools out there for the small business owner. We use Freshbooks to create invoices, plus to track the work our contractors do for us. There is a free account that is great for most small businesses.
What are your business's key tech tools and why?
Pixily – We use our own cloud based service to manage our business. Pixily is an online document management service; we are a search engine for paper and digital files. We help paper intensive small businesses manage their paper and digital files in the same place. Not only do we scan and make our clients’ paper text searchable, we also give them a text-searchable archive of their digital files. We use our own service to do a bunch of things, but one of the easiest to explain is managing our accounting work. Every time any of us gets an invoice or receipt we upload, scan or email it into specific folders within our own Pixily account. For example, if our CTO has a bill from electronic bill from Amazon he will email it into the 2009/expenses/technology/December folder. Then, our accountant logs in at the end of the month and can easily see all of our expenses from a single place, making doing our books easier. Pricing starts at about $15 per month.
ConstantContact – Keeping our users up-to-date on new features is really important, and we use Constant Contact both as a sales tool and as a customer relationship building tool. The service is low cost, at around $15 per month, and is very easy to use.
GoogleDocs – GoogleDocs is a free and easy way that we communicate with our operations team. The simple spreadsheets are ideal for sharing small bits of information that need to be periodically updated; we use it for things like maintaining inventory and letting the team know when a big project is coming in or getting finished.
Tips and Tricks
- A number of small business technology SaaS products have apps that provide a lot of functionality (or iphone/mobile enabled sites) that can help you run your business while you travel.
- Don't be afraid to email support - a lot of SaaS companies have good service and will get back to you and try to help you get the most out of their service.