Several years ago, one of the biggest costs for small businesses was software.
- Accounting software? Expensive.
- Word processing and spreadsheets? Expensive.
- Contact management software? Expensive.
- Calendar and scheduling software? Expensive.
Quite often, the total bill would be enough to make you wince in pain.
Intuit QuickBooks Simple Start Free Edition 2009 (offline) or Quickbooks Online Edition (online)?I’ve been a fan of Intuit’s QuickBooks accounting software for years. Recently, Intuit has been offering very solid basic accounting packages for free to small businesses, under the idea that if a person’s business continues to grow, they’ll grow naturally into a larger, full-featured package. The basic packages themselves are loaded with features and easily take care of every accounting feature that a small business will need in the early years, plus it offers a very clean upgrade path to QuickBooks if you decide your business is outgrowing the software.
Mozilla Thunderbird (offline) or Gmail (online)?Don’t let your internet service provider try to sell you an email package – there are tons of great packages available for free. Mozilla Thunderbird is a great free desktop client for email, but I use Gmail to simultaneously manage several email accounts all under one interface.
Word Processing
AbiWord or OpenOffice (offline) or Google Docs (online)?AbiWord may be the best word processing program out there, period, and it’s a free open source package. OpenOffice is a large collection of offce software (also a free open source download) that includes a very solid word processor. For online use, I often find myself using Google Docs when on the road – in fact, I’m composing this post in Google Docs.
OpenOffice (offline) or Google Docs (online)? OpenOffice (mentioned above) includes wonderful packages for spreadsheets (very comparable to Excel) and presentations (comparable to PowerPoint) and it’s free. When you’re on the go, Google Docs provides basic versions of these tools in any web browser – I particularly find the Google Docs presentation software to be quite useful.
Databases?
OpenOffice (offline) or Zoho Creator (online) ?Need to create a simple inventory database? OpenOffice also includes a database tool that’s quite comparable to Access and can easily meet your needs. If you’re looking for an online solution, Zoho Creator makes it very easy to create a simple database and entry form online – for free!
Salesforce Personal Edition (offline) or Keepm (online) ?As a small businessperson, you have suppliers to contact and customers to keep track of. Thankfully, there are many options for managing all of these contacts. Salesforce Personal Edition is a great free desktop contact manager, but I’ve come to use Keepm, which provides most of the same functionality online, accessible from anywhere, for free.