Eight Essential Cloud Services for Small Business

Paper airplanesIt was only a few years ago that setting up an office meant either buying expensive software licenses for proprietary applications or doing all your administration in the old-fashioned way with huge amounts of paperwork to be processed and stored. The advent of Web 2.0, cloud computing, or SaaS (software as a service) brought a host of low-cost solutions that small businesses and start-ups can deploy to minimize their upfront investment in both personnel and infrastructure. We're going to take a look at industry-leading services in each of eight essential aspects of business: accounting, invoicing, customer relationship management, productivity and storage, backup, email and SMS marketing, and postage.

Accounting – Wave Accounting

Accounting is one of the most daunting tasks facing new businesses. Wave Accounting is a free service that aims to be for small businesses what mint.com is for personal finance. It offers a comprehensive range of features to ease the burden of keeping track of money, including bank account integration (no manual data entry), double entry accounting, expenses tracking, automatic backup, invoices with customization, bill and invoice reminders, and integration with Wave Payroll.

Invoicing – Freshbooks

Wave Accounting includes the ability to create invoices, but should you decide you need a stand-alone invoicing service, Freshbooks is among the best, and considerably easier to use and more feature-rich than PayPal's invoicing service. Freshbooks is capable of both time- and item-based invoicing, expenses tracking, and simple project management. Invoices can be sent both by email and by post. The service is free for businesses with fewer than 3 clients and as little as $19.95 per month for up to 25 clients.

Customer Relationship Management – Highrise

Keeping track of customers can be a pain, but Highrise, from the design whizz kids at 37signals, is a breeze to use. It allows businesses to track their interactions with customers, keep notes of those interactions, assign tasks, and it integrates well with email. All within a slick and easy-to-use interface.

Productivity – Google Drive

Google Drive was previously known as Google Documents, and includes file storage, word processing, a spreadsheet application, presentations, and a very useful Forms application. It integrates well with other Google services, like Google Mail.

Backup – Carbonite

This is an area where many new businesses are somewhat lax. All the services we mention here are secure and will back up data, but having a single point of failure for a business's data is always a mistake. Carbonite is an inexpensive backup solution that is very easy to use. Once set up it will automatically upload data to the cloud. Business accounts can back up data from an unlimited number of computers from $229 per year.

Email Marketing – MailChimp

MailChimp is an extremely popular email marketing services, which allows users to easily create email lists and distribute newsletters. It has great social media integration and analytics, as well as autoresponders and RSS-to-email capabilities so that when a business blog is updated, emails are automatically sent out.

SMS Marketing – SimpleTexting

Used properly, SMS marketing is a great way to garner customer engagement for a small business. SimpleTexting offers autoresponders, scheduled texts, image attachments, easy number and contact importing, and threaded two-way conversations.

Postage – Stamps.com

No one likes having to trek to the Post Office at the end of the day to send out their mail, or deal with ensuring that they have the correct number of stamps on parcels. Stamps.com is a very cool services that allows businesses to buy and print their own USPS postage via an online account. Businesses can print postage onto envelopes and shipping labels with addresses. Because using the service reduces post office overheads, users get a significant discount on postage compared to postage machines. Mail pickups can be arranged to suit businesses.

The software as a service market is booming, and there are many new services being introduced all the time. If you have a favorite that we haven't mentioned, feel free to give them a shout out in the comments below.

About Robyn Warner:   Robyn works at Ink Technologies, and has been writing since she learned how to hold a pen.  Check out more of her posts on printing on Ink Technologies' blog on ink and printing, or subscribe to her updates on Twitter (@InkTechnologies) and Facebook.

Image credit: josemanuelerre

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Gary

CEO at 3Bug Media
Gary Shouldis is the founder of 3Bug Media, a web marketing company that helps businesses create 360 Marketing Strategies to dominate their market. His blog is read by over 20 thousand small business owners a month and has been featured in the N.Y. Times Small Business, Business Insider and Yahoo Small Business.