5 Tools to Save an Hour a Day When Working From Home
5 Tools to Save an Hour a Day When Working From Home
When I started working from home my typical business day would go like this…
- Start work. Look at email. Groupon sends me fantastic deals that I can’t resist.
- Spend 10 minutes trying to decide whether to purchase a how to become a pet psychic in 10 days e-course (animals not included).
- Get back to work. Notice a dirty coffee cup on the corner of my desk. Start cleaning to avoid being on the next episode of Hoarders.
- Get back to work. Remember I haven’t invoiced my client. Eat a block of Wholefood’s Gouda cheese to muster up the courage to open Excel to start the torturous invoicing process…
Does any of this sound familiar to anyone who works from home?
After going through many frustrating days like this (and many expired Groupons) I decided I would try everything available to become more efficient and productive. After two years of trial and error, I want to share with you what I found.
If you are a small business owner, contractor, or freelancer who works from home, you won’t want to miss these 5 tools to save an hour a day when working from home.
FreshBooks makes invoicing fun and easy. (It’s hard to believe, but it’s true.) FreshBooks is an online invoicing, accounting and billing software that helps you make, send and track professional invoices in seconds. You also have the advantage of storing your invoice records online for easy access rather than having to find your paper records during tax season. FreshBooks helps me remember who to invoice, when to invoice, and who owes me money.
Do you ever find yourself searching through your emails looking for messages or files from clients? Basecamp is an extremely easy to use tool with an intuitive design that can be used by you and your clients to communicate with one another. The project management tool helps you keep track of to do lists, discussions, files, dates, and allows you to assign tasks to members of your team or your clients.
If, like me, you have hundreds of online passwords you can’t remember, or worse, you have the same password for everything, you may want to look into 1Password. 1Password is a tool that generates and saves passwords allowing you to sign into websites with one click. It uses tamper-proof authenticated encryption, which keeps your information protected.
QuickBooks is Canada’s #1 best-seller of home and small business accounting software. Why? Because it makes accounting easy by connecting with your bank accounts allowing you to track the money coming in and out of your business on one simple platform. QuickBooks automatically does your bookkeeping for you, so you don’t have to.
Save your business and yourself time and money by subscribing to a group of cloud accounting software including FreshBooks, QuickBooks, Wave, Xero, and Kashoo by signing up with BDG. BDG is a cloud-based accounting firm with some of the nicest chartered accountants around. The accountants will help you set up your cloud software, assist you with financial statements and corporate taxes, and will even give you top-notch business advice. They offer every accounting tool you could need in one place.
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This guest blog post is written by Aisha Tejani, a freelance business writer who resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.