Twenty years ago, having an office meant being surrounded by paperwork. In the pre-Internet days, there was simply no way around it: no matter what line of work you were in, every aspect of daily operations (from invoicing to project management to document creation) left an enormous paper trail. Luckily, that is no longer necessary today.
Considering that Bacolod is Certainly cheaper than setting office in the US, it is best to arm yourself with the Best Tools.
Using the free/low-cost Internet tools below, modern businesses can, if they choose, run a completely paperless office:
Google Docs
America’s offices are flooded with hard copies of documents that rarely (or never) looked at on a daily basis. Whether in filing cabinets, stuffed in your desk drawer or piling up in the hallway, these papers clutter your workspace while adding no value in the process. With Google Docs, this can be stopped once and for all.
Google Docs not only has all the standard functionality of Microsoft Office (word processing, slideshows, spreadsheets, etc.) it also allows an entire office to share important documents with one another. Thus, while your current office policy might be printing out and storing records for later use, you can now simply keep them in Google Docs and print them when a need actually arises.
Skype
Looking for a way to do free videoconferencing over the web? Look no further than Skype. This handy tool enables your partners or employees to remote conference with anyone in the world (so long as they also use Skype.) The only requirements are a webcam and a microphone headset. For a nominal by-the-minute fee, you can also use Skype to place outgoing calls.
Best part: Skype also doubles as an instant messaging utility, meaning any text conversations you have with conferencing partners are automatically and digitally logged for later retrieval.
Mint
Most of us know that Mint.com is an excellent (and free) money management and simplification tool for individuals. Yet with a little ingenuity, it can just as easily perform those same functions for your small business. The typical startup has an operating account (checking) and a reserves account (savings), with perhaps an ancillary account for advertising or other purposes.
If your company is set up this way, Mint can paperlessly track and manage your corporate expenditures with little manual effort. Simply feed Mint your corporate bank account details instead of your personal ones, and watch as all financial activity is painlessly graphed, sorted and explained before your eyes.
Freshbooks
When it comes to office clutter, invoices are one of the biggest and oldest culprits. You know the drill: print one to send out, and another copy for record keeping. In addition to being incredibly time-consuming, it’s also wasteful and inefficient. In 2011, there is simply no excuse to burden yourself with paper invoices anymore.
Instead, join the 21st century and invest in a Freshbooks.com subscription. Freshbooks handles your invoicing electronically, on automated schedules. If you have three paying clients or less, you can use most of the service’s features for free. For companies with more customers, Freshbooks can streamline your invoicing process for the less than the cost of a few new Polo shirts.
Shoeboxed
Nothing looks uglier on a desk or filing cabinet than an unwieldy bundle of receipts. Different colors, different shapes, different paper textures: they’re inherently annoying to organize and almost no one bothers to even try. As a result, they just accumulate wherever they get thrown and clutter your entire workspace up. And who wants to sit down and sort them out at tax time? (Neither do we.)
That’s why Shoeboxed is such a godsend. For reasonable fees, Shoeboxed will automatically scan and categorize all the receipts you send them. Just bundle them up into an envelope, send them in, and a few days later, you’re organized – with no effort or organization on your part whatsoever.
Basecamp
It’s true: a shocking number of offices have no real project management system at all. Instead, initiatives move forward on the backs of unstructured Word documents, back of the napkin sketches and other stopgap measures that create more chaos than clarity. To become both efficient and paperless in one shot, switch to Basecamp.
A flagship product of 37Signals, Basecamp is a fully web-based project collaboration tool that centralizes every project management task you have. To-do lists, milestones, deadline reminders and document sharing are all standard features. From day one, everything you used to scribble down or print out becomes exponentially easier to just store in Basecamp instead. A free trial is available, as are pricing options to support virtually any budget.
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