As a small business owner having a digital toolkit to help run your business is essential and these are some of our must-have tools.  We just couldn’t successfully run our business without them in fact! And the great thing about cloud-based digital tools, is that they are providing a golden age for small businesses with tools that have previously been out of the reach of the small business owner, now accessible through easier to manage cost structures.

1. SproutSocial – A gift from the gods to help manage our social media activity effortlessly. From analytics to creating content on one platform for various social media platforms. Understanding your full digital presence has never been easier and we are completely in love with their calendar feature (life-changing comes to mind!).
2. Canva – Designer social graphics for free are at your fingertips with this great little design tool. Canva will take your marketing to a whole new level without the ongoing designer costs. We use a designer to help us with the blocks to ensure we don't look too "crafty".
3. Dropbox - we are all about a centralised repository for all your documents and graphics. It seems a small thing, but when you live life on the go, it's essential.
4. Harvest - Harvest makes tracking time super easy with options for the team to track time across different devices. It's the simple way to stay within budget. 
5. Zoom - working remotely means we've been on the Zoom bandwagon since before it was a verb. Meetings, webinars, training videos it's all there and they even have a free option.
6. MailChimp – a simply fantastic email marketing tool. Although they have made some changes, we love the extras they are adding onto the platform to make it even better. It's more than a platform for sending emails, check out their automation and marketing options. If we could get better reporting, we would be in seventh heaven
7. Survey Monkey – to create online surveys and analyse the feedback.  We use a payment plan version for more intense data but their free version would do the trick for a small business owner. NB: We've been playing with some new options which we getting a little excited about, see if Survey Monkey stays in our toolkit next year!
8. Google Analytics – to guide our online activity through its powerful website visitor insights. We could say the whole Google suite – the Google Apps platform is a fantastic tool for any small business.
9. Xero – who knew accounting could be fun?? OK, that might be a push, but it does make accounting simple! The NZ based company is going from strength to strength and it’s easy to see why with their easy to use cloud-based accounting packages. We would highly recommend talking to your accountant about adding Spotlight reporting for forecasting, it's a game changer.
10. Panda Docs -  Panda Docs makes it easy to create, send, track, and eSign beautiful proposals, contracts, and quotes. It has not only cut our proposal time in half through streamlining our sales process, but our proposals are now more professional.
11. Capsule - in previous blogs we were really struggling to find a CRM which worked for us. But now we have and we love how easy it is to use for pipeline, tasks and project management. It integrates with Xero which gives you a much more holistic view of your clients and leads. As I'm a tad old school I print my calendar out each week so I can tick them off (yes, I am aware it's an online platform but old habits die hard!)
12. Thinkific - NEW this year! We've started loading our training onto an online plaftorm to help you build your social and retail knowledge. Coming soon! 

We haven't included apps in this list, if you've ever looked at my phone you'll know I have a complete crush on the new latest and greatest (and yes they are filed together for ease of use), that's a blog topic for another day! 

These are just a few of the digital tools we use to keep us on top of our workload but also to take some of the time out of tasks so we can spend time on what really makes a difference to our clients. 

If you aren’t already using some of these tools check them out and let us know what you think. And if you have others, we'd love to know.