I remember the days when an email account on the Internet was the only web app out there. Then, MySpace came out and before you knew it there was a web app for any occasion. That’s great for users, because in this day and age there is app for every area of the business. Today we are using web apps in every area of our business. Let’s take a look at some examples:
Accounting: Freshbooks
We don’t know where we would be today if it weren’t for FreshBooks. FreshBooks takes care of all of our client billing and time tracking. We use it to budget our projects as well as send invoices to our clients. Now that they support linking with your bank we don’t even need Quicken to do our company’s expenses.
Project Management: LisaHQ/ApolloHQ/ SignOff.me
We used ApolloHQ for about half a year. Apollo is a great app, but it didn’t quite meet all of our company’s needs. Now, we are just using it to track tasks on projects, and the majority of our projects are tracked in our own web app called LisaHQ. Soon, we will port the task feature into LisaHQ as well, and we can leave ApolloHQ out of the mix entirely.
We use SignOff.me for all of our signoffs every time we need to get a signature or have a client agree on a checklist we send them to sign off on.
Calendars: Google Calendar
Google calendar is a great tool that allows us to keep track of everyone’s work schedule in one place. We have all of our calendars shared with one another so that everyone knows who is working on what for the entire week. This is another functionality we hope to incorporate into LisaHQ.
Email: Google Apps for Business
This is basically Gmail, but it will work with your current business domain—a great added bonus. This allows us to use all the great features of the Gmail infrastructure within our own company.
Some of the add-ons we use are ActiveInbox, which allows you to file emails into project folders as well as add emails to the production queue, mark things resolved etc. We also use multiple inboxes to create quick email filters that help us get to the right email quickly.
Security: LastPass
LastPass allows a business to simplify password and security management. We deal with many passwords on a daily basis, for ourselves and our clients, and we want things to be both secure and easy to remember at the same time. With LastPass we can give people access to accounts and passwords without them having to know the password itself. Passwords are automatically filled in when you are on the site that has access.
Site Management: InfiniteWP
We have to manage a lot of sites on a daily basis. InfiniteWP provides a centralized access point for all of our sites. We can then instantly tell what sites need updates and fix things much more quickly and efficiently. InfiniteWP is a free app that can be installed on any server.