Which Business Apps will help your business?

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This week Sam talks about apps you can use in your business.

 

Accounting apps

This is a vital part of all of our businesses. This can be done on excel, but this doesn’t give you much business information. The app also makes your life easy in many ways. Once the template is set up sending invoices is quick and easy. The app also gives you key business information in the form of reports. It also makes paying VAT easy. Xero and Quickbooks are the biggest players in town. Zoho Books is an option and can integrate with other apps. There is also Wave which is much simpler than ⁠Xero⁠ and ⁠Quickbooks  but has some free features. The free  version is great but Sam doesn’t rate the premium version
Project / business management
These are effectively ways to organise your to do lists. We can get overloaded with post it notes, pieces of paper etc. These help us get more organised. They are great for repeating task lists that you can use for consistency with every customer. It also helps with tracking the day to day tasks you need to do.  The main apps here are Monday Asana and Trello. These do very similar things but in different ways. They all have free trials, so you can try them and see which one you like. For most photographers the free version of these will do the jobs you need.
CRM
This is a customer relationship management tool. Many CRMS do a wide range of tasks. But, at that core they track all of the people you speak to and every conversation you have had with them. You can click on someone and see all the email, phone call and other conversations you have had with this person. It also allows you to set reminders to help you get back to leads or customers at the right time.  Most CRMs also do many other things such as email marketing and landing pages. Marcus uses Studio Ninja which is photography specific. Sam says it’s easy to setup CRMs as as soon as anyone emails you they are entered automatically into the CRM.
There are lots of CRMS. Sam uses Hubspot free version and has done for 6 years. There is also Freshworks and of course Zoho. Sam says in terms of a CRM, a photography business is like any other so Sam doesn’t see how useful a photography specific CRM would be.

 

Book an appointment app
Marcus brings these up as useful apps. They all do a similar thing. They hook up to your diary and allow people to book appointments. They work well. Marcus uses Calendly and Sam uses Doodle. It does save a lot of time going back and forth organising appointments.

AI
Sam says AI like ChatGPT is really useful for all sorts of things. For example checking a contract you’ve written, changing a blog into a LinkedIn article, giving you blog ideas etc. Don’t use it for creating content though.
Communication Apps

WhatsApp Business is a great app. WhatsApp is a great way to communicate with customers and leads. It looks more professional that standard WhatsApp and is free. Slack is great if there are several people in your business. If there is just you it’s a waste of time. But if there is several of you it is a great way to organise the communication within your business.