Most (if not all) small businesses are concerned with operating costs and cash flow, especially when they are in the start-up stages.  In this article you will learn how you can handle business with less than $100 per month while all your business activities are humming at the right speed.

I chose to stay away from the obvious and instead give you the resources you might not have heard about, while others might be obvious but not quite known at this time. I have divided the must-have business activities in 3 major sections:

1. Communications
2. Sales
3. Finances

1. COMMUNICATION

This activity is vital to any business and without the right tools you might as well forget about starting anything, let alone a thriving new endeavor.  Modern communication spawns across several fields:

• Telephone (voice mail)
• Messaging
• Faxing
• Online Meetings
• Email

With all the phone candy on the market most of these functions can be covered by any simple phone offered by a reliable network. Stick with Verizon or AT&T and you should have no problems with a 3 bar coverage signal in most of continental US.

In order to make yourself available to your clients, you are probably indicating your mobile phone as your primary business phone number. That’s fine and dandy but what happens if your client is outside your ‘realm” and need to speak with them on your “off-peak” hours? That $100 per month will look more like $1000 per month and the whole essence of this article would be lost.

That is why you need the all mighty Google again. Google, in case you didn’t know, is in phone business and if you are a small business, most of the stuff offered by them is FREE. Well, if it’s free – it’s for me!

Go to www.google.com/voice and check out the virtual number you can get and unify all your phone numbers into one. It’s a good read and will help you select the right central number you can now give away to your clients. Just don’t complain when they will be able to reach you from Hong Kong at 3:00 AM your time.

One thing a phone would not do is faxing; unless Steve Jobs is currently thinking of equipping the new iPhone with a thin roll of paper, this function is still bias to the existence of a fax machine or a PC/MAC on your desk.

There are however services that can eliminate the clunky fax machines off your desk and save some space for a cool new color printer, which can be connected to your computer and thus print any fax you might receive (and you really, really need to print it).  Once such service is called Fax It Nice (www.faxitnice.com). The cool part about this service is the flexibility in plans and its simplicity as a program. You can virtually fax anything anywhere without really being at your computer because it does not require any software to download. Their pay as you go program puts the “nice” in the Fax It Nice.

Next runner up – eFax (www.efax.com). Still a good service and easy to understand software but a bit pricey compared to Fax it Nice. Give it a shot and see which one you like the best.

Online meetings

Yes – sometimes you really need these and if you want to appear as a well established business you better know how to handle this function.  During these online sessions, you can share files, video, audio and even screen shots off your computer.

It’s a great tool to have access, especially if you have a lot of demos or portfolios you want to share with your audience. If that’s your need, head over to the nice people from Vyew (www.vyew.com) who offer this amazing tool for FREE.  

Email

– there is one thing I need to add about this – you totally have to check out Google mail and I am not talking here about creating a Gmail account. That would look tacky to your clients, relying on free email accounts.

I am sure, by now you have considered and/or probably already purchased hosting for your website. Usually, that comes with free email accounts. Before you do anything, just migrate your domain to Google and get your personalized email on any computer or phone. [ Read this article to see how it is done ]. I use it and love it.

2. SALES

There is a sweeter alternative to carrying a Franklin planner with you to all the meetings – a CRM (Contact Relationship Manager) system that allows you to track your existing as well as perspective clients, meetings, dates, sales appointments, alarm you when some task or another is due, and the list goes on. You can have all this for around $24 per month by taking advantage of the services offered by 37 Signals on their website (www.highrisehq.com)

Similar types of software can be found at: Sugar CRM (www.sugarcrm.com) or Sales Force (www.salesforce.com).

3. FINANCES

You are probably keeping track of all your invoices, cash flow and bill payments using some sort of combination between and Excel Spreadsheet and QuickBooks. Well, the following is a nifty tool that gives you all that and more without breaking the piggy bank. I am referring to Less Accounting (www.lessaccounting.com) which could be your cup of tea is you are a business with small accounting needs. You will be amazed about its dashboard simplicity and easy reporting, so you know your financial situation at any time.

Others that come close to what Less Accounting can do are: Blink Sale (www.blinksale.com) and Fresh Books (www.freshbooks.com).

These are just some of the applications that are available on the web, so if you are using other ones and have great experience with them, please do share.