One of the most important aspects of small businesses is something that’s often overlooked: organisation. Luckily, times are changing and there are now countless apps and programs dedicated to streamlining, arranging and just generally sorting out your company and its processes. Some of them may cost money, but it’s certainly money well spent when it comes to staying ahead of your competition.

Business Tools That Help You Stay Abreast Of Your Competition

There are many apps and programs for organisation and more are being created every day, but for the moment these 10 are the very best ones.

  1. SohoOS

The flagship product of online company Planet Soho, SohoOS is one of the best and most popular online business management platforms. It can help with invoices, websites, the management of contacts, marketing plans and more – and best of all, it’s inexpensive. The paid version, with more sophisticated features than the free version, is only about $10 a month.

  1. LockedOn

LockedOn makes it easy to communicate with vendors, to keep up with your contacts, and to finish all your tasks effectively every day. It can even let you know what your buyers are looking at and what they’re interested in! It’s also been designed to be very easy to use, so that any new employee can pick it up without needing a lengthy training session first.

  1. Site 24×7

The last thing any company needs is to lose customers because the website was down and no-one noticed. Site 24×7 prevents that from happening by monitoring your website (as the name suggests) 24/7. It also monitors how well your website is doing and how many visitors you’re getting, sorting them by geographical location if needed.

  1. Awesome Note

Awesome Note is great for people who like everything to be spelled out visually. It’s a simple app, but a very popular one – it was featured by Apple as one of the best apps available in 2009. Different things can be organised by colour, which is one of the most effective ways of organising! It’s very good-looking and customisable, as well.

  1. Bizzabo

Bizzabo, as well as helping you plan an event, can also help you ensure it actually gets attended by networking with potential event-goers and helping them connect to other people they wish to meet at the event. It’s done very well so far and has been praised for its user-friendliness and its time-saving features.

  1. Evernote

Evernote wishes to document everything you do, and it can. Arguably the best note-taking app around, it can help a business get organised by simply ensuring that no note or thought gets lost in the shuffle. You can take notes on web articles, you can tag photographs, you can do almost anything you need to all in one place. It also most definitely saves on paper, therefore saving money as well as some trees.

  1. Grosocial

Grosocial is designed to make marketing super easy by using Facebook to its maximum potential. It can help you make your Facebook page more eye-catching, it can help you run promotions and contests, it can help you find content for sharing – and more. It’s great for businesses who badly need a boost from social media but don’t necessarily have time to spend every working hour on it.

  1. ToutApp

ToutApp is an app to help any sales team achieve total productivity. It lets you follow up on email promotions and see which bits of your content people are actually engaging with. It also gives you all the percentages and all the numbers in one place, allowing you to see which areas you’re falling behind in.

  1. PressKing

PressKing calls itself “a new way to manage your media relations”, and it’s designed to get press releases out to large numbers of people – who will all be interested in what you have to say. It shares your company’s info to Facebook, Twitter, and more than 200,000 journalists and blogs. It lets you track what people are saying about your company, too. It’s much, much cheaper than hiring a whole PR team!

  1. Mantis

Mantis is a free web-based bug tracker that’s been around for over a decade. It can be used to find bugs in programs, and then manage the fixing of those bugs quickly and easily. It’s considered one of the best bug-tracking programs in the business and it’s very user-friendly.