Free and cheap tools to expand your small business

If you’re running a small business and are striving to keep your overheads down, one of the best means of doing so is with the myriad of free business software that’s now available on the web, such as free conferencing or phone conference services and office app downloads, for example.

Free Dynacom Accounting Edition

Like you’d expect if you went by the name here, it’s free and it manages your accounts – you can use to do your accounts, anyway. But still – while you will have to do some work, it’s fantastic for organisations with relatively simple needs. Dynacom’s free startup Accounting Edition provides a basic business accounting package and includes software functions for purchasing, payroll, sales, bank, and general ledger. And not only this, but it also offers users a really neat-looking interface in a format that’s both highly user-friendly and efficient.

Open Office

As with the much loved Microsoft Office, users have the ability to create word, spreadsheet, and publication-style docs. And not only this, but it also enables users to analyse data and produce stand-out presentations and effective illustrations, and your work can also be published in .pdf format without requiring any additional software – rather handy, we think.

CitrusWare

A fantastic piece of free software, Citrusware offers two incredibly useful features:

1. Invoicer – as you might expect, this creates and even prints off invoices. Users can also add and save sales items to Invoicer for to use as a template for future invoices, and are also able to apply credits or debits and charges for things e.g. postage and packaging, admin fees etc.
2. Proposal Writer – you can create and print off your business proposals, making them look super slick, helping to make you and your business rather professional indeed.

Unforgiven organiser

Much like Microsoft’s Outlook Calendar, the only huge difference is that this one’s completely free. Unforgiven Organiser allows you to oversee yearly, monthly, weekly and daily tasks based on how often (or not) they occur. This software’s Contacts Manager feature is great because it links with your Internet browser, e-mail client, and Windows telephony, which enables you to sync more and more aspects of your business management systems – great stuff.

So there you have it – just a few of the myriad of free software that ready and waiting for you and your business to take advantage of – go get ‘em!