Running your own business, even a small one, is a complex endeavor requiring many skill sets. But entrepreneurs don’t have to do it alone. These online apps and tools and help simplify and streamline a variety of tasks crucial to improving business productivity. Some of these services also offer premium add-ons and upgrades, but the core tools are available for free.

Mint mint.com

Access a variety of free financial tools, allowing you to easily manage your financial accounts at once, making it easier to set budgets. Mint also offers a variety of tools to help you shops around for loans, credit cards, banks and more so you’re making the most of your money.

Hubspot CRM hubspot.com/crm

HubSpot CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the flexible, free intuitive solution for managing your prospects and sales pipeline. Keep all your contacts centralized in a customized, searchable database. It integrates with Gmail in Google Chrome so you can easily record email conversations. Connect it with Google Calendar and you can integrate calendars as well.

Hubspot CRM has a large database of business contact information. Add a new contact, and let Hubspot CRM pull up additional information about his company automatically.

An unlimited number of users can access your database, all for free. There’s no limit to the number of contacts recorded. And it’s easy to use without stumbling through a confusing user guide.

Schedulehead schedulehead.com

Schedulehead intelligently schedules your employees by taking into account their availability and skills, ensuring you always have the right mix of staff. Automatically reaches out to workers to confirm shifts and eliminate late arrivals and no-shows.

Docracy docracy.com

Docracy is a transparent, crowd-sourced collection of legal document templates that you can edit for your own personal needs. Docracy provides legal e-signature services as well, allowing parties to sign documents online.  These contracts can then be stored securely online or exported as a PDF to be kept on your own computer or printed out.

Shopify shopify.com/tools

Shopify is a professional ecommerce solution allowing businesses to create their own virtual storefronts in order to sell online. Its tools section, however, is available to everyone.

You might not find the Business Name Generator and Slogan Maker very helpful, but there are plenty of other quality tools, including:

  • Business Name Generator
  • Logo Maker
  • Storefront Sign Maker
  • Wholesale Product Search – Lets retailers find wholesale vendors to feature in their stores
  • Terms and Conditions Generator
  • Privacy Policy Generator
  • Refund Policy Generator
  • Discount Calculator
  • Pay Stub Generator
  • QR Code Generator
  • Business Card Maker
  • Gift Certificate Template
  • Invoice Generator
  • Purchase Order Template
  • Shipping Label Template
  • Mock-up Tool – Print your designs on T-shirts, phone cases and more.
  • Bill of Lading Template
  • Barcode Generator
  • Image Resizer – Reduce images in size for optimal online load times.
  • Business Loan Calculator
  • PayPal Fee Calculator
  • Profit Margin Calculator
  • CPN (advertising effectiveness) Calculator

Evernote evernote.com

A powerful, cross-device note-taking app. Save any flash of inspiration to the cloud, from short lists to lengthy research. Evernote allows for sharing, file attachments, reminders, and voice memos, among other features.

Free Commercial Images

There are two major qualities images need for commercial use.  First, they need to be decently sized, particularly if they’re going into print. Second, you need to have the right to use them.

There are a variety of sites that provide images for commercial use for free. Some require attribution. In other words, you need to give credit to whoever created the image. Other sites, however, do not require attribution.  The following list states which sites generally require attribution.  But always double-check the licensing of specific images to know whether you need to give credit.

Pixlr Editor, pixlr.com/editor

Pixlr allows you to do many of the same functions of professional graphics editors like Photoshop.  Re-size, crop, add text, adjust colors, draw and more with this free online editor.

We Transfer wetransfer.com

When files are too big to easily send by email, use WeTransfer.  You upload the files to WeTransfer, then your recipient easily and securely downloads them.

Asana asana.com

Web-based project management system for teamwork without email. Create and assign tasks. All members can access tasks and comment on their progress.

Canva canva.com

Easily create beautiful designs and documents using Canva’s drag-and-drop feature and professional layouts to design consistently stunning graphics.