We thought we'd share some of the tools we use to run our business. You may find them useful too.

Whilst there are lots of products out there for small businesses, I always find it great to hear what other people use and why.

FOR COMPANY ADMIN

Google Suite - We use this for the ease of accessing our mail and documents when working remotely.  Added to this the fantastic auditing and collaboration tools, this low-cost solution is really great.

Freeagent - We use this for most of our business critical processes: accounting, invoicing, payroll, time recording. It’s simple to use, cloud-based system with great customer support and online resources.  We reevaluated a few months ago and it still came out on top for us.

FOR SALES & MARKETING

Hubspot CRM - This is our CRM for keeping track of contacts, interactions and deals. We also use the tracking code so visitors to our website can be updated in the CRM.  The free resources available for understanding inbound marketing are outstanding.

Hubspot Marketing - This is a recent acquisition which we are still learning about.  This has enabled us to ditch all our other social media publishing/listening and email sending software. We now have everything in one place. It also houses our blog, our content offers and has great analytics and reports.  It helping us to be efficient and effective in our marketing efforts and there's loads more for us still to learn.

Google Analytics - This is a must for tracking our website traffic along with WebMaster Tools Search Console, also from Google.  We regularly look in to see what our web visitors are doing and adjust our content accordingly.

FOR DELIVERING OUR WORK

Trello - We use this as a quick and simple solution for organising, and keeping track of our project work. We use a few add-ons to make this solution work even better for us and keep it up to date by adding comments, moving cards and reviewing our own lists regularly.

Adobe Creative Cloud - This is used by our creatives for developing their designs whether it be for logos, print or websites.  The suite of products allows for a more fluid design process allowing sharing of libraries (which contain everything they create) between teams and apps as well as devices.

Visual Studio - This is our development platform of choice. It is a fully featured solution which allows us to build, test and debug efficiently.  It also allows us to collaborate more easily and integrates seamlessly with source control to verify and audit our development.

Umbraco - This is the Content Management System behind our own website as well as our preferred solution for our clients. The ease of integration with the front end design as well as the simple layout for adding content makes it a great system to use. Umbraco is open source with a great community and published roadmap of future development. It’s also an easily scalable solution, making it ideal for a smaller website which needs to grow as well as an all singing, all dancing website.