Looking to work with your business team on projects, need tools to increase your sales, manage your accounting?  The cloud has opened up affordable and limitless opportunities for you to grow your business and save time and money while your at it. Many of the recommendations come from Forbes

1.     Accounting & Finance

  • Sage Accounting: Quickly manage payroll and manage your business receipts for free.
  • Expensify: Get a handle on all of your business expenses and invoices so you can concentrate on more important things.
  • Clockspot is an online time clock that helps simplify payroll to just a few clicks.

2.     Customer Support

  • ZenDesk: Streamline your customer service interface, create support boards and streamline your response time.
  • GetSatisfaction: A great customer community platform for interacting with your users, getting feedback and providing technical support.
  • SurveyMonkey: Build free surveys to conduct market research, and keep a pulse on customer desires and satisfaction.

3.     Human Resources

  • ZipRecruiter:  Find better talent with cross-job-board posting, resume screening and a point-based score chart to find the best candidates.
  • Intelius: Run a background check on prospective employees, browse criminal records and other information to make sure you’re hiring only the best people.
  • AnyPerk: Reward employees with one of the most comprehensive perks programs out there, which provides discounts in countless services.

4.     Legal

  • Legal Zoom Business Attorney Plan: This attorney plan specifically tailored to small businesses provides attorney reviews of contracts and other legal documents, for a fraction of the price.
  • Docusign: The most prominent service for eSignatures that is both legal and secure.
  • Trademarkia: Search over 6 million registered logos, names and slogans to make sure your name or idea isn’t taken.

5.     Sales

  • Sage CRM – Organize your contacts in sales funnels, enjoy better business insight, greater efficiencies and increase productivity across your entire business
  • Highrise:  Organize notes, tasks and email conversations for up to 30,000 customers, leads, partners and contacts.
  • Leads360: A sales management solution specifically tailored to turn leads into conversion, and track your performance so you can easily improve your sales.
  • BidSketch: Create professional and clean client proposals in just minutes, and get a certified client signature when they approve.
  • Microsoft Dynamics : Sales by Microsoft Dynamics provides a complete and intuitive solution that can help salespeople be more productive so they can focus on what’s most important—delivering amazing customer experiences.
  • Agile CRM:  Sales & Marketing CRM with intelligent automation, telephony, web engagement, social media integration, email campaigns and mobile marketing. Free for 1000 contacts! Neat feature: has build it time scheduler for perspective customers to auto schedule time with you.

6.     Marketing / Email Services

  • MailChimp:  Email marketing made simple with an easy-to-use collection of newsletter templates, as well as the ability to customize your own design.
  • SpyFu: A keyword tool for comparing the SEM tactics of your competitors, so that you can meet equal success in your online advertising and SEO campaigns.
  • HubSpot: This all-in-one inbound marketing software facilitates SEO blogging tips, lead nurturing, marketing automation and more.
  • Constant Contact  – Number 1 email marketing tool – very robust

7.     Operations

  • Yammer:  For the international businessperson, create a private social network for your contacts to collaborate virtually, share files and spread knowledge.
  • Asana: With tasks, projects, conversations and dashboards, Asana enables teams to move work from start to finish.
  • Carbonite: Excellent and affordable cloud storage and online backup for any business.
  • Trello: An efficient collaboration tool that allows you to organize your projects (completed, pending and in-progress) into simplified boards.
  • Todoist – This program is great because it connects with gmail to help you plan your tasks efficiently – create recurring tasks, assign tasks to your team, categorize and more!
  • Microsoft Office: The powerful software in Microsoft Office 2013 remains in Microsoft Office 2016, including features and shortcuts for the things you do most often, like creating professional-looking presentations, working on spreadsheets, or word processing. And because Office 2016 allows you to open, save, modify, or collaborate on documents in the cloud, you can maximize efficiencies and do great work anywhere, anytime. Microsoft Office is much more powerful and comes with better support than free software, like Open Office or Google Docs.
  • Telus Business  – When it comes to your business, getting the right tools at the right price is one of the best ways to leap ahead. At TELUS, small business is a big priority. Let us show you how technology can help save time, reduce costs and boost sales, allowing you to focus on your core business.
  • Scheduling: YoucanBook.me -is booking software that integrates with your Google and icloud Calendar so you can let others access when you are free and book time with you.

8.     Web Development

  • Balsamiq: For your next business presentation, Balsamiq allows you to mockup and design your ideas on a virtual whiteboard so they’re easier to share, modify, and get feedback on.
  • 99designs: Run a graphic, logo, or web design contest, and walk away with multiple ideas and access to hundreds of designers.
  • Amazon Web Services: An amazing service that allows you to run your entire business from the cloud, from business applications to mobile apps.

9.     E-commerce

  • Recurly: For any business that offers subscription or recurring billing, Recurly provides a simple solution for getting this done.
  • Shopify: Set up a fully hosted and customizable online shopping cart that accepts all global currencies.
  • Vendio: A platform for selling your goods on multiple e-Commerce channels, including Amazon, eBay, Facebook and more.

10.  Technology

  • UserTesting: Get in-depth and immediate feedback on your website experience from real users, including a video of their experience as well as written answers to your questions.
  • Jira: A simple and clean bug tracking and reporting system that helps you prioritize and assign issues and work through them quickly.
  • MixPanel: A premiere analytics service for mobile and the web, focused on measuring very specific user actions and activity.

 11. Social Media

  • SocialBro: “The number-one marketing platform for Twitter,” SocialBro maps community engagement on a simple graph. This is a tool made for businesses with the goal of monetizing their followings. A 15-day free trial is offered.
  • TweetBeam – Share social media twitter feeds
  • CrowdFire:  By the power bestowed upon you by Crowdfire and so on and so forth, you can manage your Twitter and Instagram accounts far more effectively by:
    • Finding inactive users and your unfollowers – unfollow them if you wish to
    • Finding relevant users to follow using our insightful “Copy Followers” feature
    • Keeping track of how your social media updates affect your follower/unfollower stats
    • Checking the relationship between any two Twitter/Instagram accounts and doing a whole lot more.
  • Tweetdeck: Now owned by Twitter, Tweetdeck aims to maximize reach. With its customizable dashboard, users can schedule future tweets and monitor activity across several accounts — all at a glance.
  •  Social Rank: Your Social Rank groups your best followers, most engaged and most valuable. From this information, businesses can take extra care of valuable customers. Social Rank generates a free report on the day of sign up.
  • PageModo overhauls the aesthetic of Facebook pages by providing custom cover photos, additional tabs and unique landing pages. PageModo offers a basic free package and upgrades start at $6.25 per month.
  •  Word Press is arguably the simplest way to add a blog to a LinkedIn account, which will attract more connections through content. Word Press is responsible for 23 percent of webpages on the net.
  • Buffer App: Suggests content to share with suggested quotes as well – has a great scheduler that is far better then tweetdeck etc.
  • Sumall is your social media analytics and business dashboard. All in one place, all for free. Has free verison to let you know who gave you the most powerful tweets etc
  • Similar Web – Will give you traffic numbers on competitor sites
  • Trendinalia Canada – Shows you what is trending on twitter in Canada
  • Twitter Analytics   – Gives  valuable insights related to your twitter followers
  • klear (formally Twtrland) – Provides you with a rating on your twitter influence and helps you measure who you should be connecting with based on location, profession, etc and tells you how engaging, friendly etc they are – gives suggestions of who to connect with