Essential Tools for Virtual Entrepreneurs.
Save time and be more efficient with these inexpensive and free applications.
Welcome to our series of blogs on “Essential Virtual Business Tools for Entrepreneurs.” In this series, we share outstanding tools that we rely on each day to save time and be efficient. Many of these applications have both paid and free versions. Check them out to see if they can save time for you.
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Where do you brainstorm business ideas and map out your processes? Do you outline your ideas? Maybe you enjoy creating process maps? In my office, I have notepads, calendars, whiteboards and the post-it notes covering the walls. These physical tools give me a place to park ideas while I focus on the job at hand.
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Beyond the physical tools, I depend on a couple of great virtual tools to collaborate remotely with my team.
- Whiteboard Fox is an online whiteboard. This application allows you to use a mouse or touchscreen to draw on the board like a physical whiteboard. When you want to work with your team, you can share your board with them. The team can collaborate from anywhere with network access. To work with your team, Whiteboard Fox has two sharing options. Leave the board open to real-time team edits, or lock the board so only you can make changes.
– Coggle
- Coggle is a collaborative mind mapping application. It allows me to build hierarchically structured diagrams or flow charts where I can organize, plan, and share complex ideas with my team. I am not a strong artist, so I prefer to type rather than draw. Coggle is the perfect app for me. There are a number of robust features. Like Whiteboard Fox, I can share Coggle with my team and allow them to make edits in real-time, but with Coggle I can export my projects as a pdf. Coggle has become my go-to application to map out new campaigns, processes, or direction for our business.
Atomic Bookkeeping 