What are the best apps for business management?
Business management can be a bit of a juggling act.
You don’t want to then have to juggle lots of different business management apps too.
So how do you pick just one? Well, you get someone to make the decision for you.
Not just anyone, though. You want to ask the people who know SaaS apps inside out: the SaaS professionals themselves.
Luckily, we asked them for you, so that’s one thing to tick off your to-do list. We got all of our SaaS friends to answer a survey about the business tools they can’t live without, so that you don’t have to spend ages um-ing and ah-ing over different coloured dashboards.
Ultimately, we’re aiming to put together a definitive guide to the best SaaS apps across lots of different business categories. If you have your own recommendations, don’t hold back! We’d be more than happy to feature your favourite tools in the final roundup.
To kick things off, we’re looking at the oft pernickety, but essential task of business management.
SaaSters recommend: the best apps for business management
Airtable
Recommended by Brittany Berger, Founder at Workbrighter
Airtable is a mashup of spreadsheet and database that’s ideal for type A personalities who like organising things, especially when organising things looks pretty 😍
You can use it for making sense of your content calendar, assigning tasks to all your minions (if you’re a solopreneur, you’re your own minion), storing important bits and bobs like brand assets, and much more.
“I use Airtable for financial tracking & projections, contact directories, CRM and deal tracking, etc. I like that it makes spreadsheets friendlier for non-numbers people,” says Brittany.
Pricing: $0–20/mo
Plutio
Recommended by Sunil Neurgaonkar, Growth Hacker and Co-founder
Plutio claims to be one app to manage your entire business, which is a lofty claim, but when you check out their list of features, it’s pretty darn comprehensive. You can use it to do your paperless paperwork (timesheets, invoicing, contracts, etc.), and it’s even available in 25 languages, which is nifty for all you trendy remote teams out there.
Pricing: $15–30/mo
Zenefits
Recommended by Corey Haines, Content Marketing Manager at Cordial
@Zenefits has lots of benefits, but with a ‘z’ on them. We’re not actually sure where the ‘z’ comes in, but maybe it’s because seamlessly managing perks, payroll and HR under one roof makes you really zen. What sets Zenefits apart from other HR software is that, in addition to all the tech stuff, they also offer human-to-human support as part of their expert advisory services. Lovely!
Pricing: $5–9/mo
Bill.com
Recommended by Sue Duris, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience at M4 Communications
Sue says Bill.com is one of her favourite business management tools because it’s easy to use and comes with ‘pretty robust reporting’. Who doesn’t love robust reporting, eh? Bill.com says it will reinvent your back office, helping you pay people or get paid up to three whole times faster. Kerching.
Pricing: $29–custom/mo
Xero
Recommended by Sue Duris, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience at M4 Communications
Sue also gave a shoutout to Xero accounting app, which helps you spend less time on mundane bookkeeping (yawn), and more time doing things that matter to you, like watching cat videos or tagging your friends in memes. They also have a mobile app, making it possible to do your accounting on the loo.
Pricing: £10–27.50/mo
Quickbooks
Recommended by Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, B2B SaaS Consultant
Quickbooks also has a mobile app — shall we start a UGC campaign for them featuring all the weird places you can do your accounting from? It’s ideal for freelancers and small businesses, helping you save receipts, send invoices and estimate tax payments, as well as manage payroll when you start to grow your team (go you!).
Pricing: £4–14/mo
Stripe
Recommended by Olga Bedrina, Content Manager at Animatron
To be honest, where would we all be without Stripe? The online payments platform is used by pretty much every subscription business we know, but also works a treat for ecommerce stores and crowdfunding campaigns.
“We use Stripe to handle our payments. It’s an easy-to-use and robust solution that helps us get a full picture of how our sales are doing,” says Olga.
Pricing: Pay as you go/custom
Shoeboxed
Recommended by Claire Trévien, Founder at Trevien
Saving receipts like a chronic hoarder? Then you need Shoeboxed. Shoeboxed is on a mission to reinstate the humble shoebox to its true purpose in life, which is to store your Yeezys/Crocs, not your wrinkly old receipts or those business cards people keep shoving in your face at networking events (has nobody heard of LinkedIn?!). Just like magic, Shoeboxed turns them into delectable data to peruse from your screen of choice.
Pricing: $29–99/mo
Wave
Recommended by Jordie Black, Content Marketer at Copy and Check, and Wesley Bush, Founder at Traffic is Currency
The best thing about Wave, whose accounting software empowers small businesses every step of the way, is not that it’s completely free. It’s that if you use it, you get to be called a ‘Waver’. The nice people at Wave help their Wavers build up confidence running a business by making all the daunting tasks, like bookkeeping, simple and stress-free. Sounds rad ✌️
Pricing: Free/pay-per-use
Zapier
Recommended by Jessica Malnik, Content Strategist, Copywriter & Entrepreneur
OK, enough about accounting already. Zapier is a real whizz of a tool that helps you connect the dots between different apps and automate all your workflows (for example, automatically saving attachments from Gmail in Dropbox, then alerting you in Slack). If you’re a certified Busy Person, Zapier is a lifesaver, cutting down time you spend on fiddly manual tasks. You can customise your own workflows, so we think it would be pretty funny if someone did a roundup of the weirdest Zapier workflows and integrations (we would do it ourselves, but we’re busy being Busy People).
Pricing: $20–250/month
Emailmeform
Recommended by Aiza C., Content Developer and Marketer at EmailMeForm
Right, so Aiza might not be an entirely objective party here, but since we love surveys (hey, we used one to create this blog post!), we’ll let her off the hook. In the words of Aiza herself, “A little biased here, but we use EmailMeForm for NPS, feedback collection, and a whole lot more. You just can’t live without forms and surveys these days.” Too right! And we always think it’s a good sign when a business uses their own business tool to run their business (#meta).
Pricing: $8.25–33.33/month
We hope you found this post helpful! If you’d like even more SaaSsy goodness, don’t forget to subscribe to lifetimedeals.co to stay in the loop about outrageous deals and discounts on all sorts of amazing apps.
