Cloud-based digital tools 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.

As a small business owner, having a digital toolkit to help run your business is great and these are Connec+ must-have tools.  We just couldn’t successfully run our business without them in fact!

These are some of our top ten saviours:

1. SproutSocial – to manage our social media activity effortlessly. From analytics to creating content on one platform for various social media platforms. Understand your full digital presence has never been easier and we are completely in love with their new 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 social media pages to a whole new level.
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 it easy to track 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 - 
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. 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.
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.
10. Panda Docs -  Panda Docs makes it easy to create, send, track, and eSign beautiful proposals, contracts, and quotes. It's not only cut our proposal time in half through streamlining our sales process, but our proposals are now more professional.

There is a glaring large gap in this list, CRM. We're tried many and still can't find one that works for our business model. Hopefully, when we revisit this list we'll be able to include one! 

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 with our loved ones. 

If you aren’t already using some of these tools check them out and let us know what you think. And if you have other great digit tools we would love to hear about them.