7 Must-Have Tools For Growing Your Small Business

45% of small businesses fail during their first five years. It’s not impossible to stop this large failure rate, but this is usually due to the same mistakes they  make. This is by trying to do everything manually and wasting too much time on small tasks. 

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In this case, your productivity levels can significantly drop. That’s why in this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning more about the must-have tools you need for growing your small business. 

1. Abacum- Best Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) tool 

FP&A focuses on setting up a series of strategic business processes that are focused on long-term financial planning and analyzing the organization's performance and predicting future financial outcomes. 

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In short, it’s important for making good decisions and for allowing departments to collaborate with one another. Abacum is one of the best FP&A tools you can use since it allows you to automate their budget workflows and streamline leadership approvals. Your access to analytics and insights is accelerated, allowing you to deliver higher value to users. 

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Key features of Abacum include: 

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• What-if analysis 
• Report templates 
• Budget workflow automation
• Headocunt planning 

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Abacum is an excellent tool to use when you are looking for flexible planning solutions and the best part is that it has a highly dedicated team that continuously informs you on new features that come out. 

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As for pricing, you’ll only get to know once you book a demo with them. Otherwise, there are no public prices available. 

2. Perbox- Best employee benefits software 

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Perbox allows you to provide perks and benefits to your employees, recognise and reward good work and provide them with updates. Different workplaces will offer different benefits through their employee benefits package. That’s why it’s always important to keep a good eye on them. 

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You need to carefully analyze your employee benefits package and this software helps you do it. In short, they need to be competitive and answer the following questions: 

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• What benefits am I offering my employees? 
• What additional benefits can I offer that align with my business?
• Are the following benefits valuable to my employees? 

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For helping you narrow them down, you can consider these two employee benefit categories: 

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• Health and wellbeing benefits: Most benefit packages offer a certain degree of health benefits and vision coverage. These health and wellbeing benefits usually include mental health resources, fitness-related benefits, healthy food vouchers and more. 
• Financial benefits: These include standard contributions such as tuition fees, employee discount rewards, financial planning resources, stipends and more.

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Perbox’s platform has more than 1000 different employee discounts and deals. These are globally available and at a local level. 

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Moreover, the platform offers flexi points monthly. With these points, employees can purchase extras at no costs, from a basic subscription to online therapy sessions and much more. 

3. Leapsome- Best employee management software 

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It’s always important to have software for staff management. Before you choose your employee management software, it’s important to ask yourself the following questions: 

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• Does the software help your organization grow? 
• Does the software integrate with other tools to make people’s life easier? 
• Is the tool user-friendly? 
• Does the Analytics tool have enough access to data that’s easy to understand and offers clean insights from your employee management strategy? 
• Does your tool offer all-in-one features? 

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It’s very important to ask these questions and out of all the picks, we think that Leapsome is an excellent choice when it comes to employee management software. The software promotes company alignment and can grow when your business needs change too. 

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It also delivers new features at all times and takes user feedback into consideration in order to improve its services. There’s also a “Goals module” feature that ensures the company's goals are heading the right direction and tracks individual employee goals too. 

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Moreover, Leapsome can integrate with: 

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• Slack
• Microsoft Teams 
• ISO 27001 Compliance 
• Multilingual interface and more 

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It’s a highly trusted platform and used by popular companies like Monday, Spotify, Unity and many others. 

4. Baluu- Best booking & scheduling tool

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Baluu is an easy to use booking system for events and appointment-based business. Regardless if it’s group bookings, appointment-based, or even starting a small e-commerce business, where you can also integrate your branded pages with your website and replace it with its website builder services. 

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There are many different tools you can use, such as: 

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• Booking Widget: Allows you to integrate your booking options into your website in only a few minutes. 
• Appointment Bookings: Gives you the ability to customize your time slots and service prices. 
• Termly Bookings: Lets you book multiple sessions at once. 
• Block Bookings: You can create session blocks to sell them as one to your customers. 
• Upsells: You can create upsell offers on each bookable slot you offer 

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Baluu offers a 30-day free trial that you can use. If it’s a good fit for you, you can continue to use it for 14 Pounds a month + VAT. 

5. Google Analytics- Best data analysis tool

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful small business tools you can use for gaining powerful insights and qualified data. All of this data can be used for producing daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly reports. 

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It is free to use for everyone and it’s an excellent tool for small businesses who are highly concerned about analyzing data. When you don’t analyze data, you don’t know which direction your business is heading and if you’re on the right track or not. 

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However, if you choose to go with the paid plan, it might turn out to be an expensive option. The paid version costs $12,500 per month and offers you Google Analytics 360. 

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If you are on a tight budget, you want to continue using the free version, which is also highly advanced in providing reports compared to many paid tools. 

6. Buffer- Best social media tool

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You’ve most likely heard about social media tools. Buffer is a social media scheduling tool you can use. You don’t need to manually post every update on social media since it already does it for you.

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Many social media channels are now incorporating new algorithms that require you to use paid ads since organic traffic is becoming harder to gain, but Buffer comes around this and helps you organically build an audience. Even if you’re into paid ads, the amount of reach you get will be higher. 

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When running a small business, social media channels are one of the greatest ways to promote your product or service. The only thing you have to do is to find out where your target audience is most active. 

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Key features  include: 

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• Social media post scheduling 
• Team management 
• In-depth reports 
• Clean interface 
• Scheduling social media posts to different networks 

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As a small business, you are just getting started with your career and the great news is that you can use this tool for free. However, if you think that’s not enough and want to dive deeper into their paid plans, you’ll be paying up to $120 monthly for 12 channels. 

7. Buzzsumo- Best for finding influencers 

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Buzzsumo is a platform that supports the idea of trending content and searching for influencers. The platform has millions of influencer accounts that allows you to scroll through every niche and find the required influencers for supercharging your content. 

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Key features include: 

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• Influencer alert: Once an influencer you are following posts new content, you’ll receive a notification, so you can be one of the first to react. 
• Analyzing influencers (Content analyzer): You can explore more about the influencers interests, likes and loves. This feature shares content that is most relevant to your brand and allows you to discover influencers that are posting content relevant to your target audience. 
• Cross-platform search: You can scan all social media channels instantly. 
• Export data: Allows you to export BuzzSumo data to your Excel or CSV file. 

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Some of BuzzSumo’s limits are that it doesn’t have the best user interface and not a great fit if you have a tight budget. This is due to the reason that you’re running a business and the more users you have in your pricing plan, the higher the costs will go up. 

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Basic pricing plans begin at $199 per month per user. In this case, you’re running a small business, so you’ll want to focus on the Enterprise plan, which is $999 per month per 30 users. 

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The best tools to choose for your small business

We divided each tool into its own categories, so it’s important for you to identify what your business needs are. Each tool we mentioned has a special place in its own category, making it easier for you to make a decision. 

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Every tool is special in its own way and it’s always important to pay attention to your budget. If you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose between two tools, always check which one is the best option for you.