Virtual Office Featured Article

Four Tools to Get Your Business Rolling

September 29, 2015
By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

Pity the startup when it comes to time. There’s so much to do, and so little manpower; the life of most startups is constant triage.

Since time is in such short supply, it becomes important to lay a good business foundation and do it quickly; there’s no time to be fiddling with accounting software when a business is honing its unique sales proposition and building out its offerings to customers.


With that in mind, here are four basic business tools that startups can lock into place so they instead spend the bulk of their time on what makes the firm unique.

1. Phone.com phone service.

 All businesses need calling plans of some sort. Phone (News - Alert).com gives businesses pro-grade business phone features but without the need for a telephone closet. Phone.com is a cloud-based phone service that works with smartphone, can interface with Polycom (News - Alert) desk handsets, offers a range of calling features—and is priced affordably.

2. Salesforce.com for customer relationship management.

There are many CRM systems on the market, and this can distract a startup. Worse, a poorly built CRM system can be too complex to use, too simple to deliver the customer management needed, or too limited once the business grows. That’s why Salesforce.com (News - Alert) is a good option; it is the industry standard CRM, and it scales very well thanks in part because it has a robust plugin ecosystem that extends functionality.

3. Quickbooks.com for accounting.

Even if you don’t know accounting, you probably have heard about QuickBooks; the Intuit (News - Alert) software is the defacto standard for SMB accounting, and it has been for almost as long as anyone can remember. Anyone who does know accounting will already be familiar with the system, and its cloud option now makes it easier to use than ever before.

4. Slack.com for team collaboration.

If you’re a startup, you probably have a distributed workforce at this point. That makes collaboration and group messaging important. While there are many options in this category, Slack has seriously taken the business world by storm and everyone and their mother now swears that it is a lifesaver. Go with the herd on this; you have better things to focus on than developing a custom way to communicate with employees and partners.




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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