Today I want to introduce five fantastic tools that every modern business process owner or entrepreneur should know and use. These are famous for making the best of your time and money as a company.
These tools have no limitations on industries or verticals! It can help human resources optimise processes faster; marketers improve their CRM systems; non-technical users can automate manual tasks quicker and easier.
Creating technology solutions that drive your business further is a breeze with these platforms. From simple functions to complex problem solving is done with the help of the tools listed in the blog. If you are tech-savvy, you probably can do this all yourself to automate your business and save loads of time and money!
Read this blog to understand the top 5 tools that you can use to automate your business processes
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Airtable
If you are using spreadsheets to manage all your business information currently, you’re surely struggling with keeping your data clean, creating multiple copies to limiting access to the data. Airtable is a relational database but also a simple spreadsheet that you can use to link data together. With it, moving your data into one place is easy enough for anyone, and delivering less than munged data to the end-user means clean solutions for everyone. Moving to Airtable requires the least amount of learning and maximum returns.
With Airtable you will get;
⚡ A single source of truth for your data
⚡ Automation capabilities to integrate with other systems
⚡ APIs (thus enabling Airtable to be used as a database)
Since Airtable is flexible, it can be used for a variety of business functions; from customer relationship management (CRM) to project management to inventory management. Run a training business? Manage all your students, classes, payments, reports in one place with Airtable
$20 per user/per mth of Airtable can get you a database and a CRM that you can customise to your needs.
While the Pro plan of Airtable suffices for most cases, if your database needs the capability to have more than 50,000 records per base, here is an alternative that might work for you; Baserow. It is an open-source NoCode database and Airtable alternative.
Softr
Softr has made building a dynamic website as simple as creating a PowerPoint presentation. If you want to create a website that displays dynamic data and allows the users to search and filter that data, Softr on top of Airtable or Google Sheets is your tech stack for it.
Benefits of building with Softr;
⚡ Easy to configure, drag and drop components.
⚡ A polished and responsive website without any developers or designers
⚡ Extend your website with subscriptions, memberships, charts, payments, and many more features
Let’s say you are in HR and want a Job board for your company. With Softr, you can create a job board and add jobs in just a few clicks, making the jobs filterable and searchable. Allow interested candidates to fill out forms/ contact you through the job board itself. If you are an HR manager and don't have any technical knowledge, no need to wait for tech people to build your job board, you can use Softr to do it yourself within days.
From $0 per month, the costs vary according to capabilities, and at $65 per month, you can launch client portals, marketplaces, internal tools, and other web applications.
When creating Client portals and Internal apps, you may want complex roles and permission ability. StackerHQ is an alternative to Softr that gives you deeper control over how you want your data to be shared.
Jotform
There are many instances when you need to send out a form to your customers and your users. Maybe it's a feedback form on your website, maybe you're taking pre-orders for your new product and want people to submit their details, or maybe you just want to collect some data about who's visiting your site. Whatever the case may be, Jotform is a great form builder that you can use.
Jotform, brings in everything you would want in a form in a single tool. From complex Question types, Branding, eSignature to Calendar, Payments to Inventory Management widgets, you can run a small business through it.
$29 per month gives you access to creating 100 forms, 10,000 submissions, and HIPAA compliance.
If you have multiple people working on Forms for your company, Formstack gives better access control for team members to collaborate.
Zapier
One of the main reasons we use tools is to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks. As business owners, we often wish there were more than 24 hours in a day, but the truth is, whether you’re working on your own or with a team, there will always be things that take up your time and prevent you from doing what you do best. Luckily, there are now more than enough tools out there to help you outsource the tiny tasks that grind your gears. Zapier is one such tool. I always recommend Zapier to anyone starting with automation.
It’s a great product with;
⚡ Zero or minimal learning curve
⚡ Maximum integrations, with varied platforms, to work with
Let's say you are a sales employee. You now have a CRM that helps you access all your opportunity data from one place. However, bringing all that data into that CRM is time-consuming. Your client recorded client calls must be uploaded to your document management system and referred to in your CRM against the client. Zapier can take this off your hands by automating such that any time a meeting finishes, it uploads the recording under the appropriate folders without any manual intervention.
For $20 per month you can sign up for this superpower and start optimising your workflows.
The way Zap counts your automation tasks against your plan can get quite complicated the more complex automation you create. If you are creating complex automation which requires conditional paths or formatting of data or iterating through data, Integromat is a great alternative to Zapier. It gives you more control while not charging you for each feature.
Glideapps
It is a single-line statement, but it is accurate and useful. Glideapps has turned into the gold standard for No-Code app building. Glide gives you the ability to create an app on top of your Google sheets. When it comes to enabling non-tech people into building apps, Glideapps is the best. You don't need to understand the depths of data design, user management, scale, or anything tech to make a fully functioning app through Glide within hours. And as a bonus, you get a beautiful UI that works on both web and mobile devices.
Let’s say you are a restaurant and want to make your menu accessible through a QR Code. You’re probably already managing your menu on a spreadsheet. Glideapps will get enable you to create this app and give you a QR code to put up on your Restaurant so that your users can view the menu. Since the data will be through Google Sheets, any changes you make to your sheet will reflect immediately on your menu.
$32 a month will get you a scalable, fast, beautiful mobile app with capabilities ranging from Location maps to Barcode scanning and eSignatures.
Since Glideapps creates progressive web apps, for some use cases it may be found lacking. Appsheet is a great alternative for when you want push notifications, native camera capabilities, or geolocation features.
I hope you find this list useful to get you started on adding value to your business.
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