Odds are, you’re doing at least a few things in your business with less than optimal efficiency. As the old mantra goes, “time is money.” Since money doesn’t grow on trees, maybe these tips can serve as the fruits of knowledge amongst this tree of a helpful article. These are relatively broad application use-cases that are applicable to most businesses, but rest assured: even for niche use-cases, there’s an app for that. 

Doing things knowingly inefficiently is foolish and bad for business. Gabe Alves, Founder of TrackMySubs knows this all to well. He built his app to fight one of businesses’ hidden flaws: subscription management. Your business has tons of recurring costs. Tracking due dates for those costs is important. Many businesses will often intend to utilize a service for a short period of time for a short-term project, with the intention to cancel afterwards. A sizable portion of businesses have attempted a free trial of a paid service, only to forget about the trial’s expiration date and incur needless cost. Applications such as TrackMySubs completely eliminate the possibility of this kind of epic business faux pas, sparing your business critical time and money, and you embarrassment.

But it doesn’t stop at subscription management. Here’s 4 more ways to make running a company less stressful:

1. Social Media Management: Are you manually updating your social media channels? Odds are, the overwhelming majority of your social media posts are not time-sensitive live-updates. Take the brunt out of this task by scheduling and automating the posting of your social media content. This will significantly slice the time you invest into your social media channels every week, and simultaneously keep you on-track for an appropriate content saturation level.
2. Task Management: If you’re pinging emails back and forth for all of your business operations, or, worse yet, utilizing calls, emails, or hunting down colleagues in person, you’re doing it wrong. Task management applications enable those working on specific tasks to update those tasks in real-time, enabling anyone collaborating on, or curious about the status, of a task to simultaneously view the updated and most recent details regarding any task. The time saved in terms of simply not needing to request the status or details of any task, on both ends, yields dividends in time for a business.
3. Time Management: Anyone in a managerial position is extremely well-versed in the importance of properly tracking employee’s times. Ensuring employee times are accurate ensures they are compensated properly, as well as provides extremely important data for operational oversight, including future hiring decisions. Many businesses conduct this process like dinosaurs; some are even still using paper timesheets. Modern time tracking tools provide a much more time-effective (pun mildly intended) solution.
4. Calendar Management: Anyone utilizing a pen-and-paper calendar will scare off business partners and prospects via appearance of being a technophobic dinosaur, with the reputation of inefficiency attached, with extremely rare exceptions. Put simply, utilizing a web-based calendar enables others (often with varying levels of permission of visibility) to see when you’re available and/or even what you’re up to. Gone are the days of asking ‘when are you free’ or ‘when are you working on this?’ Best yet, these calendar applications often plug into other neat applications and gadgets.