These digital tools will help you keep your business running better and in less time

When you are running a small business or are a freelancer — of even if you’re side gig is killing it, you have to do a lot of work that doesn’t contribute directly to your bottom line: Accounting, scheduling, paying people, getting paid, and talking to colleagues or customers. It’s all time consuming and that often isn’t time that’s going toward the work you do. Fortunately, there some terrific apps and online tools that streamline this office work, keep you organized, and make like easier. The right tools can not only save you time but make you better at what you do.

Here are five of my favorite work tools.

Scheduling meetings

I don’t have a personal assistant and, like most freelancers, am not likely to ever have anyone to do scheduling for me. This can be super time consuming. But it’s necessary. So when someone wants to talk on the phone or meet online, I let Calendly (free to $12 a month) take care of the scheduling. All I do is send a link. The person who wants to chat can see what times on my calendar work for them and, with a few clicks, book a meeting. It calculates all the time zones for everyone, saving irritating mistakes, and is brain-dead simple to use.

Managing money

There are a lot of tools for tracking invoices, payments, and business expenses. And, while the most well knows is probably Quickbooks, my favorite — and I’ve tried most of them, either for articles or my business, is And.Co (free to $18 a month.) It’s simple to use, doesn’t ask much from me and does everything from send invoices and remind me when they haven’t been paid to create proposals and contracts, track time, or even send demand letters if people try to stiff me. It’s so simple to use that I spend very little time on accounting. I can do it all by glancing at the app once a week and responding to its reminders.

A business phone line

Setting up a separate phone line for your business gives you peace of mind that using your personal phone number does not. It lets you set hours, for one thing, for when your work line rings. So that clients in other time zones don’t call when you are at dinner or asleep. It allows you to leave a business-specific outgoing message. It gives you a line that’s not tied to your location so you can post it on your web site. And it’s nice to have separation. There are a lot of options in this space. Google Voice is free but is limited. RingCentral has every feature you could ever need but is quite pricey. My favorite is OpenPhone.co ($10.95 a month for a basic plan), which has terrific collaboration features, can be shared with a team, has high-level phone-tree options and — my favorite — lets you record calls from the Web or iOS or Android app.

Conference calls

I don’t have to tell you about Zoom. But maybe you don’t always need or want a video call or the complexity of running one. If you simply want to give some people a phone number to dial into, want a recording of the call afterwards, and don’t care if people show their faces, I like Freeconferencecall. It’s free and lets you set up your own branded page.

Keeping it together

Whether you work on a team or just have a lot of details to organize, I cannot recommend enough adopting an online tool that lets you capture, organize, assign, and track every project and detail  and share that information with others (when you want to). You have a lot of options in this space. Asana (starting at free) is terrific will let you organize your projects in boards, lists, or other ways and is often used by software developers to keep big, complex projects organized but remains simple to use. moday.com is awesome, too, especially if you work with a team. It’s really hard to choose among these but I’m currently using Clickup.com (free to $5 a month), which has a set of features that suits my freelance work style — and syncs well with my Google calendar. It also fits my budget.

When you purchase anything through links on this site, GeekGirlfriends.com sometimes earns a little money. It doesn’t cost you any extra, but you are making this content possible. I only recommend products that I own, have tried through the company’s review program, or covet. Thanks for your support.