So you’ve managed to take your sales processing, CRM, accounting and inventory management online with Brightpearl – but how about the rest of your business? The advent of cloud computing has brought with it a huge number of lean, cost effective tools for  the small business owner. Here I take a look at a selection that can help you be more efficient, productive and scalable – all of which we use en masse at Brightpearl HQ!

1. Google Apps

Google Apps consists of a number of tools aimed at businesses – including mail, documents, calendar and much much more. It’s FREE for small businesses, easy to set up and scales all the way to huge companies with thousands of staff. Brightpearl plays really nicely with Google Apps – you can even sign into Google Apps and Brightpearl on the same login.

Google Mail, or Gmail as it’s sometimes referred to, is an amazing piece of technology. It’s a web based email application (as you’d probably figured out from the name…) used by millions of businesses across the world. You can use the web based interface to access your mail via a browser, set up your smartphone to access mail directly from the Google servers, and even set up your Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail program to access GoogleApps over IMAP or SMTP. You’ve got a virtually unlimited amount of storage space online, brilliant search and filtering capabilities and superb spam filtering built in. Of course you can use your own domain name too (anything@mycompany.com) – a common misconception is that you have to have a gmail.com email address. Brightpearl works seamlessly with GoogleMail – just set up your SMTP details and all outbound emails from Brightpearl will be routed via your Google server and appear in your Google sent items folder.

Google Docs is a web based document system, which lets you store any kind of file online and share it between your staff, but more usefully lets you collaborate live on Google-hosted documents like letters, proposals and spreadsheets. In fact the live editing capabilities are truly incredible when you think about the tech that’s going on behind the scenes. You can, comment on sections (with updates being sent automatically to document subscribers), track changes and do all the formatting you’d need for most scenarios. It goes without saying that I wrote this in Google Docs!

We often use a Google spreadsheet to track progress of a complex job that needs everyone pulling their weight at the same time. We’ve had 15 people editing a single todo list all at the same time, updating colours, status and adding notes. Powerful stuff.

Google Drawings is a part of Google Docs and a great way to throw down basic ideas for workflows, mockups and layouts. It’s a vector based drawing program. Instantly available for the rest of your team to see (and you can share with clients and suppliers too just by adding their email address). Here’s a diagram I popped together a while ago to describe the order processing workflow in Brightpearl:

Google Calendar – another part of the Google Apps suite – makes it easy to manage your own calendar, see what everyone’s up to across the company, schedule meetings with clients and generally make sure you can do lots of things in a nice organised fashion without your head exploding. You can sync it with your mobile phone, and also with your Brightpearl account. No matter if some of your team are running on Microsoft Exchange – it’s easy enough to connect everything up together.

Read our guide on setting up Google Apps for Brightpearl

… more Google Apps integration plans in the pipeline too

2. Skype

Skype’s great for a number of different things. In the early days when there were just a few of us, we used to use Skype as our outbound company telephone system. It’s cost effective, doesn’t need any hardware (just a laptop or computer with sound card) and multiple staff accounts can be administered from a central log-in to handle credits. You can also get a free 0845 number directed to a low-cost “Skype Online Number”, so that you can use your Skype system for inbound calls too. We ran Skype for telephony until we were about 8 staff – after that you might need to think about bandwidth issues on your internet connection.

You can even add Skype details into Brightpearl and just click “call” from within your CRM system

We use Skype chat extensively across the whole company for chit-chat, both work and social. We’ve a number of different “channels” running; Sales, Support, Product, Company – All etc. It might sound strange to use a chat system if you’re all in the same office together, but the benefits of communicating on Skype chat include:

Keeping the office environment quiet and free of distractions

You can even set your Skype notifications up so that it’s quiet until certain keywords come up. We let everyone know about important things at short notice using the “company – all” channel, and we arrange social events via the “company – social” channel. The latter can get a bit noisy sometimes with 40+ people involved; I’ve set Skype to notify me only when the keywords “beer”, “lunch” and “cake” are mentioned

3. Dropbox

Every business has a load of documents that need to be stored centrally somewhere, with access granted to only certain individuals. Dropbox is a web based storage system that automatically synchronises with each shared user’s hard drive – which means you have the benefit of online backup, shared access and also the ability to work on your own hard drive with complex spreadsheets that Google can’t deal with. Out 5-year business plan is a great example of a monster spreadsheet that would make Google Docs cry. There’s a useful amount of space available for free, beyond which you need to pay, which is reasonable enough.

Other stuff we like

SurveyMonkey to capture information about customers to help us build a better app and deliver better customer service
Google Analytics to track traffic on our website and spend more sensibly on the marketing that works
Jira to handle all the bugs and development process
Oh, and Brightpearl for Helpdesk, CRM, Accounting, Purchasing and Task management

And it’s all online!

… so there’s a lot of stuff here. In fact when my laptop decided that I’d been giving it too much abuse the other day and decided to abruptly keel over and die, I didn’t mind. I just popped down to the local PC shop, bought another one and was back up and running at full productivity later the same day. Try that with on-premise software …