Our Top 5 Online Business Tools to Ease Your Operations
As many of our clients transform their business models to be more accessible online, we want to share some incredible tools (many of them free!) that can help simplify the process. From graphic design to ensuring your accounting is in order ahead of tax season, we’ve compiled a list of our favourite online business tools that have streamlined many of our day to day tasks and elevated our business!
Graphic Design - Canva
High-quality graphic design makes a huge difference in how your business is perceived and how you effectively communicate with your community. It can also seem really daunting to learn, and many first-time entrepreneurs don’t have the budget to outsource these projects. Enter one of our favourite online tools — Canva.
Canva is a website that helps you create beautiful online designs with ease. Choose from awesome templates (Instagram posts, web banners, powerpoint presentation, business cards, the list goes on!) and drag & drop away! Canva offers free as well as premium memberships to access their website and is incredibly user friendly. Give it a try and discover just how easy it can be to create beautiful designs and promotional materials.
Accounting - Wave
Keeping your books in order during the year will ensure a much easier tax season and will save you a great deal of stress. One of our favourite (and free) accounting platforms to use is Wave. Wave is a free invoicing & accounting software with credit card processing & payroll services. You can add multiple accounts under one roof (say you do business under multiple business names, including your own), customize your invoices with your branding, and more! Wave allows you to set reminders to automatically notify your clients that due dates are coming up and even send them a receipt once a payment has been made.
Newsletters - Mailchimp
While it seems that everyone is on social media these days, email marketing is still a highly effective tool to connect with your target audience. Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps you manage and talk to your clients and customers. It allows you to create beautifully designed email campaigns, manage your contacts, and provides powerful data analysis. You can now send email campaigns to hundreds of people with the simple click of a button.
Photo Editing - VSCO
We all love a beautifully curated Instagram feed, and a consistent aesthetic can really elevate your brand. Enter VSCO, a photo and video editing app providing users with preset filters and editing tools. Choose from your favourite presets to set the tone for your feed, or play around with the editing tools, such as brightness, grain, saturation, and more in order to get your photos and videos looking their best. Export them directly back to your camera roll and you’re all set to post to social media!
Online Signature Platform - signNow
As lawyers, we often require signatures from our clients on documents, retainers, you name it! To make that process as easy as possible, we primarily use signNow for electronic signatures. This is a paid online platform that allows us and our clients to sign, edit and send documents online with ease. With signNow, we’re able to add signature blocks, initials, dates, or text on PDF forms and it’s extremely easy to navigate and use the website. We are notified when we send documents out and once they’ve been signed. Now, more than ever, allowing our clients to complete a task virtually with no contact is key and the process on both ends is very user friendly!
We hope that you find these apps and platforms as beneficial to your business as they are to ours. This isn’t a sponsored blog post, nor will these tools work for everyone and their business, but our goal is to share what’s been working for us. It’s no easy feat to pivot a business model and these tools are here to help simplify the process. You’ve got this!
If you’re looking for legal support as you bring your business into the online sphere, please reach out to AWE Legal, as we’d love to help you navigate the process. You can contact us at: info@awelegal.com
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