Top 10 Essential Tools for Having an Efficient Office

Each year, companies lose 30% of their revenue to inefficiencies.

If you aren’t maximizing the efficiency of your company, that is a lot of money you are losing out on. But it can be hard to tell which efficiency tools are actually helpful, and which just add more useless processes.

Don’t worry, we have you covered.

Read on for our top 10 essential tools for an efficient office

1. TimeCamp

TimeCamp a piece of free time tracking software. It can be very useful to small businesses. It helps with developing a system of productive team and time management.

This software tracks the time your teams spend on work projects. With this information, it creates detailed, comprehensive reports.

It can also serve as accounting software. You are able to create invoices based on the time entries. In one easy click, you can then send them to your customers.

2. Evernote

Evernote is a versatile and handy collaboration and note-taking tool. It saves notes, sets reminders and you can upload attachments.

It syncs across all your desktop and mobile devices. Evernote’s bookmarklet feature makes it easy to clip web articles to read later.

Some features that can benefit your business include:

• Store mission and vision statements
• Store business plans
• Collecting and managing meeting minutes
• Collecting business reports

It can also help your business move towards going paperless. You can store instructions, notes, business cards and receipts on Evernote.

3. Hemmingway

No matter what your writing level, there are going to be times where you want it to be better. You want your brand’s content to be engaging, but it has to be readable and powerful too.

Hemmingway Editor is a word processor and proofreading tool. It helps ensure what you write isn’t over-complicated for audiences of all reading levels.

It helps you write clear, powerful and simple content. This will help your content reach out to more audiences. It helps detect adverbs, hard to read sentences etc., all color coded for ease of reference.

4. Google Alerts

Google alerts mean you can keep tabs on when your brand or business appears as a mention anywhere on the web. This is great for tracking PR. It also helps to make sure you’re getting links from anyone who mentions you.

All you need to do is fill in a couple of fields and boxes with specific words and phrases. Google will then send an email when your criteria appear in a new internet page. You can even specify what you want to track:

• News
• Books
• Blogs
• Discussions
• Videos
• All the above

It’s the perfect tool to see how well your creative marketing strategies are working.

5. Mention

This tool works like Google alerts but focuses on social media instead. It reports on what’s happening on social media, letting you know who is talking about your company and where. It’s your own personal spy!

Thanks to this tool, you can learn what customers like and dislike about your product or service. It also helps you locate where your business sits among your competitors.

6. LastPass

For those who are tired of forgetting their passwords (and having to reset them), LastPass is your savior. It will remember and store all your passwords. It also works across several devices!

It will store the passwords in your ‘vault’ and audit them, helping you make them more secure. It may sound too good to be true but it is very secure. LastPass comes with a 5-star rating from PC Magazine.

7. PBX Phone System

A public branch exchange (PBX) phone system is hardware that receives incoming calls and distributes them to employees. It uses sophisticated rules to get them to the right people.

They also provide access to features like transfer, call schedules, and auto attendants. These features can be very important and save time when running a company.

It used to be the case that PBX systems were large and expensive, giving only enterprise businesses access to them. With advances in technology, hosted and virtual PBX phone systems are now accessible to smaller businesses.

8. Google Drive

Google Drive offers free cloud storage of up to 15GB. If you need more, you can pay a monthly fee to increase that limit.

This starts at 100GB and grows to a whopping 30TB. For micro businesses – 15GB will be enough to start with.

As it is accessed via the internet, it is a great way to store documents that you want to access anywhere you are. You can also use it for file sharing, with the ability to give different people different levels of access.

9. Worklife

As a nation, we waste $25 million on unnecessary meetings each day.

Meeting agendas and minutes help to stay on track, but they can be time-consuming to make. Worklife has customizable agendas that cover one-on-ones, project updates, basic meetings and more.

Once in the meeting, you can type on the agenda to take minutes. There is no need to make separate ones.

They update in real time. This means everyone can add notes at the same time with a history keeping track of who added what, when.

When finished, Worklife integrates with the likes of Evernote and Slack. This allows you to save those minutes straight to your team’s collaboration tools.

10. Slack

Email isn’t always the best means of communicating with co-workers. If you have a quick question, this can clog up your co-worker’s inbox.

Email threads can quickly become too long. This can cause you to lose track of what you were discussing in the first place. In these types of situations, Slack can help.

It is a simpler tool than using email to discuss work with your co-workers. You can tag certain chat participants to notify them of something they need to know. It will ping straight to them, with no danger of getting lost in the inbox!

The Makings of an Efficient Office

As you can see, there are many tools out there that can help you on your way to an efficient office.

Whether you are planning, collaborating, recording information, or much more besides, there are tools to help. Select the ones that fit your office, and see how much time you could save.

If you found this article interesting, check out our tips on simplifying your business to make more money.