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Keeping Track of Your Small Business Finances Using Online Tools

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Starting a small business is, of course, an incredibly overwhelming experience. There are always factors that you haven’t accounted for, and trying to keep a good overview on everything that’s…

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Starting a small business is, of course, an incredibly overwhelming experience. There are always factors that you haven’t accounted for, and trying to keep a good overview on everything that’s going on can sometimes feel completely impossible.

Nevertheless, tracking your finances can be a much easier burden to manage than you may originally have thought. Using the tools we’ll be sharing with you today, you can start to keep a closer eye on your finances without needing to become the kind of number-crunching accountant you always thought you needed!

Wave

Since it first hit the market back in 2010, Wave has grown in popularity exponentially; in fact, over two million people have used it to handle their account, payroll, and invoicing requirements.

To make things even easier, the app has its own receipt scanner, meaning that you don’t need to use a bulky desktop alternative just to track the costs of the lunch you treated your latest client to!

One of the most useful features the app has is its ‘Find an Accountant’ option; should you run into any serious financial trouble or concern, you can find someone to help you sort things out without even needing to leave the app!

Wave is free, and we definitely recommend it for anyone who needs to track invoices and accounts, whether you’re a freelancer, business owner, or an accountant yourself.

Due.com

While Wave is an incredibly useful app, Due.com does have a significantly prettier design on its side. The invoices it allows you to generate wouldn’t look out of place next to those produced by an actual accountant, and the unique colour-coding system allows you to keep an eye on the progress of your affairs at a quick glance.

If you have less than five clients per month, Due is free. Otherwise, pricing options start at just $3 and this will open up some seriously useful features, including unlimited invoicing, recurring payments, and paypal integration.

You Need a Budget

We recently wrote about You Need a Budget (YNAB) in another article where we were discussing useful apps for tracking personal finances; but would you believe it, it’s also a great tool for small business owners to use to track finances.

Much like its behaviour with personal accounts, YNAB helps you to make informed decisions based on actual calculations. This means that you’re not spending money that you expect to have at a later time, only the funds that are already in your account.

You can use it to automatically pencil in payments, split transactions, and schedule upcoming bills.

And even better – if YNAB appeals to you and you find it works well for your needs – there’s no need to subscribe to a monthly or even annual plan. Instead, you’ll be given a free trial upon signup and, once it expires, you can by an unlimited license for $60.

So there you have it; a selection of our favourite tools to use when managing your small business’ finances. Keep checking back for more great articles like this in future, as we’re just getting started!

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Entrepreneurship Forex Home Business Investing Personal Finance Tech

Investing in Apps for Future Profits

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Thanks to the app ecosystem growing in such a significant fashion, there’s now a booming market of mobile apps designed to help you make money. Whether you’re a seasoned FOREX…

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Thanks to the app ecosystem growing in such a significant fashion, there’s now a booming market of mobile apps designed to help you make money. Whether you’re a seasoned FOREX trader or a rookie, everyone can do with a little extra cash in their pocket at the end of the year.

That’s why, today, we’re going to show you how you can invest in apps and start making a small nest egg for yourself. By signing up with any of these services, you can get to work on your portfolio and start seeing some serious gains; you won’t be like Gordon Gecko (though that’s a good thing, right?) but you will have a little change to throw around.

Acorns

Investing in Apps can turn your phone into a profit center

Acorns is a pretty ingenious idea for an app. Basically, it’s an iOS and Android app (which you can download for free) that helps you turn your spare change into returns that are actually significant – over a long-term basis, of course.

So how does this work? Well, first, you download the app and sign up to their service. Link your account to whichever bank card you’d like to use, and then forget about it. Whenever you use that card to pay for items in the real world, Acorns will deduct it from the next highest dollar value (which is a fancy way to say that it rounds the price up to the next dollar).

The difference is then invested into your portfolio, and Acorns allows you to decide how risky you’d like your trades to be. The lowest risk will, of course, offer the steadiest returns, but at a rate some of you might find boring. The higher risk, on the other hand, may pleasantly surprise you one day – but don’t say we didn’t warn you if you end up broke!

Betterment

For those of you who’d like a more traditional type of experience, Betterment is somewhat like having your own personal stock trader, except its behaviour is completely controlled by a series of algorithms.

You’ll create your own account, and then pledge an investment of anywhere between 0.15 to 0.35 percent of your annual salary. By specifying the kind of returns you’d like to see (whether that be to build wealth or create a nest egg), Betterment will start to make the kind of investments that are suited to your goals and hopefully get you there.

Openfolio

Openfolio is a great idea for an app which isn’t directly related to making trades, but will definitely be of use to anyone concerned with keeping a comprehensive overview of their financial affairs.

Essentially, you can connect the app to every aspect of your financial life. In fact, Openfolio proudly boasts compatibility with over 100 banks, meaning that you can keep an eye of your cash flow and assets while also being presented with some very easy-on-the-eye analytics to help you understand how all of them are working together.

Likewise, it can provide advice on how you can make your cash work better for you without needing to actually do any work. This one is highly recommended by us!

For more great posts about trading, remember to keep checking back. It’s obviously a notoriously intricate thing to get involved with, but these apps can help you start to build a better future for yourself with a minimum of time invested.

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Featured Tech

Three Great Apps for Collaborative Working

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It can be a huge task trying to choreograph a team that are often working from different locations. With the advent of remote working, it’s not hard to suddenly find…

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It can be a huge task trying to choreograph a team that are often working from different locations. With the advent of remote working, it’s not hard to suddenly find that you have twenty different iterations of the same file in different states in your inbox. Likewise, two users simultaneously updating different versions is a similar complaint we hear all too often from frustrated business managers.

However, there are apps designed specifically to make working as a collaborative team much easier, no matter how far away you are from each other. Today, we’re going to look at three particular apps which we think will make managing projects for your team much easier.

Evernote Business

Evernote Business is basically an enhanced version of their premium personal service, designed to allow teams to work together more fluidly. As well as the ability to have in-app discussions, shared work presented in order of the most relevant updates first, and easy user management, the app is built on top of a fundamentally sound design to make utilising these functions as intuitive as possible.

In fact, those of you who use it with teams of more than 25 people will even get a personalized service from Evernote, helping you to get the most out of the service. User management is particularly easy, while the included TLS/SSL encryption with two-step verification means that your work is always as secure as possible.

Dropbox

Everyone’s favourite tool for seamlessly backing up their files to the cloud provides many features that will benefit large teams working on the same files. It’s designed to work fluidly across all major operating systems (including Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android), while everyone who signs up will immediately receive 2.5 GB of free storage space indefinitely.

While that might not sound like a lot of storage space, we guarantee that it will take a long time to fill up if you stick to using it exclusively for word documents, PDFs, and compressed images. Dropbox is a great place to start for those teams that don’t need all the bells and whistles of the other services on this list, but just want to easily keep each other updated with which files they’re working on.

Salesforce

While Salesforce is really only going to be useful to sales teams, it’s safe to say that those who work in the field will struggle to find a more useful, purpose-designed service.

It is in fact several apps which can be integrated together to provide a seamless working environment. These include The Sales Cloud, which is the company’s own CRM app. It has a lot of really useful features, including sales leader-boards, and it provides instant access to all of your top leads (each of which can have their own personal page with their contact details and links to their social media profiles).

Likewise, the social.com service from Salesforce is incredibly useful for maintaining your ad campaigns on any major social media network. You can use analytics to tailor your ads to appear for certain target demographics at a specific time, and it will automatically identify and prioritize your higher-performing ads over time, meaning that you will be getting the best returns from your campaigns.

Lastly, The Service Cloud enables you to manage your company’s customer relations in one unified place. There’s a lot of great bespoke features here, including the ability to natively Facetime any of your customers who require assistance, as well as the ability to immediately escalate urgent situations.

So, hopefully this list will help all of you looking to make a shift into the field of collaborative working. Remember to keep checking back for more great articles like this, as we’re sure to be discussing more apps which you can use to help your business grow!

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Tech

Awesome Apps for Managing Your Finances

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We live in an age of constant stimulation; if you’re not being told exactly what to buy by the television, internet ads, blogs, and YouTube videos, then you it’s just…

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We live in an age of constant stimulation; if you’re not being told exactly what to buy by the television, internet ads, blogs, and YouTube videos, then you it’s just as likely that you’ll be consumed by work or addiction to online technology.

With this fast-paced lifestyle, it’s not hard to lose track of what’s going on in the background; namely, the state of our own personal finances. Thankfully, there’s a slew of great apps out there which we can use to keep tabs on how much we’re spending.

Today, we’re going to look at a selection of our favourites for doing just that.

You Need a Budget

Also known as YNAB within its community, this app is pretty spectacular. Its goal is to help you visualize your finances, so that you can stop living on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis. In fact, its emphasis on assisting you in tackling your debt and dealing with unexpected circumstances is a breath of fresh air in the free-flowing world of app releases; because, when all things are considered, the only thing better than an original app idea, is an original app idea that helps you to drastically improve your standard of living.

Instead of allowing users to set their own disposable spending limits, YNAB analyses your funds by gathering information about your regular income and expenditure, and then creates a budget around that. This means that, instead of merely having saving goals, you’ll be living within the most realistic income of all – your actual earnings! Genius.

Acorns

Another great tool for helping you to build your own nest egg is Acorns. By helping you to develop good financial habits, this simple app can let you start making the steps you need to build up a considerable nest egg.

How does it do this? Well, every time you make a purchase using a bank card which you’ve pre-configured with the Acorn app, it will round the amount to the next-highest dollar. By investing the difference between the price of your purchase and how much is actually deducted from your account into low-cost exchange-traded funds (and you can actually tell the app how risky you want your investments to be), you’ll start to see your rate or returns significantly grow.

After all, who doesn’t want to find an extra $500 or $1,000 in their investment account at the end of each year? We’re serious guys – try this one!

Microsoft Excel

Yes, it’s ghetto, but it gets the job done. In fact, in the years before the proliferation of genuinely useful mobile apps for managing finances, I used to manage all of my expenses using a fairly straightforward Spreadsheet I put together in Excel.

Even with the most rudimentary formulas, you can tally up how much you’ve been spending, how much has come in to your bank account, and identify those sinks where you’re spending too much money and take the necessary action needed to close them up.

Of course, there are countless ways to manage your personal finances using today’s mobile technology. In fact, for those of you who are really into it, you can combine several different tools to create a kind of monolithic, terror-inducing master method for saving money. However, for those of you who just want to save a little, any of the above options are going to get you on the right track starting today.

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