Managing a business can be difficult in person, let alone remotely. If you have a team of remote workers, or if your entire business is done remotely, you’ll need the right tools to ensure it runs smoothly and your decisions are communicated effectively and across all platforms.
Here are 6 tools that will help you manage your business from anywhere in the world.
Conference Calling Services
Let’s start with the basics. You have a huge project coming up, the deadline is set and you need to meet with your team to discuss the details, but they’re all in different areas of the world. You need to make a conference call, but via traditional phone avenues, this can be expensive. Using an international conference calling service can mitigate costs and provide a better overall experience.
Sites such as Conferencecalling.com offer worldwide conference calls on a dependable platform. With global reach and expert operators, conferencecalling.com can help you make the most of your conference calls. They also offer screen sharing services, so you can share important visual information with your team.
Cloud Storage
Cloud storage has removed the need for bulky hard drives and flash drives for sharing secure information. Through a cloud service, you can save and share important documents and messages via an encrypted platform.
Sites such as Google Drive, DropBox, and Microsoft OneDrive have free a paid storage space, and many also have business options that offer a bit more space for less. You can create folders and share them with one or multiple people, making projects easier than ever to manage and send among team members.
The prices vary between each service, but generally the more storage you need, the more you’ll pay for these services. Generally a business will need several hundred gigabytes of storage space. Google Drive offers up to 15GB free, whereas Dropbox only offers 2GB free.
Make sure your team members are using the same cloud storage service to ensure whatever you’re sharing is communicated quickly and efficiently.
Payments and Invoices
There are dozens of online platforms for managing payments and invoices. If you’re an international business, or have employees that operate outside of your country’s banks, an online payment management service may be your best option.
PayPal is the most widely used platform, reaching across hundreds of countries and currencies. Any payment processing service will charge a fee for receiving payments, and PayPal’s fee is $0.30 per transaction, plus 2.9% of whatever you receive.
Stripe is another large provider, charging the same as PayPal but providing insights, free currency conversions, and a customized checkout experience. Stripe also offers extras such as automated accounting services to help you manage and document your income.
When choosing a payment processing service, it’s important to remember that your customer’s security (and your own) should be the top priority. Be sure to research the service’s record with security breaches and management, to ensure you’re getting the most efficient and secure money processing experience.
Team Management Platform
Managing a global team has never been easier with team management platforms such as basecamp. Basecamp allows you to manage everything from communication to tasks and deadlines, all remotely. Basecamp takes away the complexity and errors of email chains and back and forth phone calls.
You can use basecamp to create a project and include everyone in your team. There, you can track their progress, send and receive messages, change or upload information, and keep everyone on the team accountable.
Basecamp provides a company HQ page, that the entire company can see. This provides a sort of hub where team members can see what everyone is working on, saving you those time-consuming status meetings and update calls.
Appointments and Availability
Scheduling appointments and meetings can be difficult when running a business. Syncing everyone’s availability can be nearly impossible when there’s a large project to be completed or your company has a large workload overall.
Besides using tools such as Google Calendar to sync your reminders and dates, sites such as TimeTrade offer availability snying, intelligent appointment scheduling, and more. Each team member has a profile that shows their skills, tools they use, and availability. You can use this to match them up with other team members for projects, set meetings for only specific skill sets, set goals and deadlines, and match customers with the best candidate to assist them.
Presentations
You’ll probably end up having to give a presentation at some point in your business career; whether to a board or simply the team members you’re working with on a project. Creating a good presentation can mean the difference between success and failure, between funding and no funding. Good presentations are concise, confident, and aesthetically pleasing.
Prezi is an online resource for creating eye-catching presentations. They offer personal and business packages. Your presentations can be changed on-the-fly, allowing adaptability to your projects when new information is provided.
Remote Management Is Ever Changing
Just like everything else in the business world, remote management is an ever changing entity, with new sites and tools created every year to help small and large businesses better manage everything from employees to projects and payments.
The resources mentioned here are some of the best in the industry, offering quality services and products and excellent customer service to keep your business running smoothly.