Following on from last month, here are some more examples of apps where a basic ‘freemium’ entry level model is offered free of charge so you can test drive them before financially investing.

Accounting

Wave – a free web-based accounting, customisable invoicing and receipts platform that you can sync with your bank account. You can send invoices from your business email address, while receipts can be scanned using its free iOS and Android app, recording receipts as accounting transactions. Wave makes its money is if you use it for online payments: the service charges 1.4% plus 20p for each transaction on European-issued cards (2.9% plus 20p for cards issued elsewhere). Pandle – developed with British small businesses in mind. Only 20% of small businesses in the UK currently use bookkeeping software, with the remainder using spreadsheets or manually kept records.
Easy to understand drop-down menus allow you to enter transactions and suppliers, create quotes and customisable invoices and export figures to Excel. The platform allows you to create profit-and-loss and balance sheets and file VAT returns to HMRC through its Making Tax Digital initiative.

Project Management

nTask – a project management tool that’s especially good for creative projects. It’s an online calendar-based platform that enables you to create tasks, bundle those tasks into projects, convene meetings, flag issues and create timesheets. Nifty features include seeing what percentage of each task or project has been completed.

Agantty – a calendar-based system enabling you to add tasks, projects and assign team members in a clear work-flow chart for short and longer term planning. You can toggle between what needs to be done today, this week or this month. It also interfaces with popular cloud storage sites such as Dropbox and Google Drive.

Your Diary

Evernote – At its most basic it allows you to create to-do lists. You can create notes that are then stored in notebooks for easy reference. Evernote Business adds features enabling collaboration and links to Google Drive, email systems such as Outlook and CRMs
like Salesforce.

Doodle – available on iOS and Android, it’s a fast way to check participant availability and fix times and dates. The ad-funded free option offers basic scheduling suggests times and lets you invite participants, pick the best option and lock the lesson.

Social Media Management

Hootsuite – a sophisticated social media management dashboard that connects with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others which enables you to schedule posts and analyse how they’re performing. Importantly, its analytics function allows you to track and improve social return on investment (ROI).

TweetDeck – Trying to make sense of any Twitter stream can feel overwhelming. One widget that puts your Twitter feed in order is Twitter’s own Tweetdeck. You can add as many Twitter feeds as you want — searching for competitors or what people are saying about you – and you can manage up to 200 Twitter accounts from one dashboard. You can schedule tweets as well.