Today, I’m sharing some of the best business tools

Let's face it. Business is tough. You need every tip, trick and tool to be successful and have a leg up on the competition. I've been in business for 20 years. And in those years, I've found some good tools, great tools and bad tools. Today, I'm going to share a few that I'm using myself and that I regularly recommend for some companies and executives. Some of these tools are well-kept secrets. And not any longer!

  1. Google Work, online collaboration and document management tool. How can you even stand to email files back and forth and then manage multiple editions from multiple users and all those revisions. Right as I'm in the middle of updating a file someone else chimes in with their revisions. Oh! I hate that. It's 2016! Are you still faxing too? Come on! Get with it. Use Google Docs, Google Drive and Google Work. You'll be much more productive. Heck. You'll even be more popular and more liked! I promise. Google Docs is a. maz. ing. We love it. You can see and make real-time updates, see revisions history. Make suggestions, comments and so much more. And it's always available and backed up in the cloud. No more, "I left that file on my home computer," etc.
  2. ReviewMaster, online review management software Disclaimer here: We created this customized software so every company - regardless of its size - can better college, manage and promote their online reviews, just like large companies.
  3. InvoiceSherpa, customer payment reminder automation software Getting paid on time by my B2B clients used to be a real pain. Not anymore! This software automates reminders to your customers using our existing account system. Not only that, it allows us to pass along credit card processing fees and late fees. Our accounting system doesn't do this, but InvoiceSherpa does! Our AR aging went from an average of 15 days to an average of zero days!
  4.  QuoteRoller, proposal software QuoteRoller makes it super easy for us to customize our contract templates and get signatures online. We are really pleased with this service and enjoy its proposal analytics and close-rate intelligence. (Update: QuoteRoller has transitioned to PandaDoc that offers many more features.)
  5. Genius Scan, shout out to Brian Gilbert for introducing me to this app. It quickly captures print outs as PDFs from your smartphone camera.

As I think of more that are highly useful to me and my team - and worth sharing - I will! We're using a several tools and will make a recommendation once we know which ones are the best.

Image credit: 123rf