Spend All Day In Front Of A Spreadsheet? Check Out These Apps

Running a business can often be a bit of a chore, especially if a lot of your time is spent filling out spreadsheets. But what if there was another way? Then that would mean that you’re actually wasting a lot of your time doing something that you don't actually need to do, massacring your productivity.

It turns out that there is another way, and it involves the judicious use of apps for business. Here are some apps that will help you to maximize your productivity and say goodbye to spreadsheets for good.

Time Tracking

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Time tracking is something that regularly involves the use of a spreadsheet, whether it’s to track the number of hours you’ve worked with a particular client or to write down an employee rota. If you’ve ever actually done it, you’ll know that it’s a laborious task that takes a lot of work. The good news, however, is that rota planning software can remove a vast amount of that legwork. It can automatically plan out rolling shift patterns and be confident that you’ll have the right people available at the right time.

Project Management

The idea behind project management apps like Asana and Trello is to make sure that everybody in your business is on the same page. Projects can often become confused and mixed up when wires get crossed, leading to higher costs and more stress. Centralizing communication is often able to help significantly, connecting employees together in a vast network.

Some of the best-known project management apps help people to do things like track progress on a project, share files, manage calendar and workflow as well as create chat groups within particular projects. What’s more, many of these systems can just be layered on top of your original infrastructure, making them easy to use.

Communication

Do you wish that you could communicate with your team better than simply via email? It’s something that a lot of entrepreneurs and business leaders have been asking for for a long time, but it’s only really now that their dreams are coming true. Just as we’ve seen a proliferation of chat apps in the consumer space, we also see a growth in the number of these apps in the business space too. Apps like Slack and Hipchat, for instance, have been designed from the ground up to meet the needs of business. For example, having separate channels for different themes can help compartmentalize conversations, preventing time from being wasted in meetings.

Another benefit of these apps is that some of them are cheap. Usually, a $2 a month subscription will get you access to basic services which you’ll make back many times over thanks to increased efficiency.

Customer Relations

Finally, spreadsheets are often used to manage customers. But spreadsheets aren’t particularly dynamic and don’t update themselves on the fly. They require somebody going in and making an edit. There are apps, however, that allow you organize your customers depending on what stage they are at in your sales process.