For those of you managing clients and project work, we thought we would put together list of the five business tools that are essential to our business.We’ve tried various programs to keep our business running smoothly, and it is a real process of trial and error! Our business is constantly evolving and we are constantly trying new things. Let us know in the comments below what your essential tools are, its great to hear how other business’ are using technology to make their work flow more efficient and to give their clients a great experience.

Basecamp

Basecamp is our Project Management system of choice - we absolutely love it! It gives us an organised place to house all of our client project communication, calendar, files and anything else that will be part of any client project. You can also personalise how you want to work with Basecamp and choose whether you would like to have a daily recap emailed to you, and notifications when items are completed etc.

Wordpress

We use Wordpress to build all of our websites (including out own). It’s a state of the art platform that allows us to create the best damn professional websites out there and means our clients can grow and develop into utter awesomeness! For all the geeky gals out there, we always use the Genesis Framework.

Google Apps for email

For email, we use Google Apps for Business. It has a great 25GB storage space and syncs with Calendar, Contacts, Docs, and all the other Google functions. It’s not free but at approx. $50 per user per year, we think it’s pretty good value. You get one main address but you can also set up as many aliases as you like.

Xero

Xero is our amazing accounting software and boy has it made our life SO much simpler! No more shoeboxes of receipts, YES! It’s cloud based so we can use it from anywhere and our bookkeeper can access it too. The software is so clever that it can match transactions from your bank account and Paypal with your Xero account automatically. Who doesn’t love that! And if those things aren’t enough, Xero can also look after all your invoicing. You can customise your invoices and email a link to your clients so that they can view and pay online making everyone’s lives a little easier.

Adobe Echosign

We use Adobe Echosign to send all our contracts and important documents that require signatures. You can email a document to a client via Echosign and request a signature online, removing the need for printing and posting, which let’s face it, delays things BIG time. Echosign is seamless and emails you confirmation when documents are signed and it files it for you too. Magic! So how about you? What are your must have tools to keep your business running smoothly?