The Best Business Management Software
Get the best business management software for your business. Compare product reviews, pricing below. Read our buyer’s guide for more help.
Most small businesses, freelancers, or companies managing multiple entities will require some way to manage all of their activities. A business software will improve and automate these activities to make your business more efficient and rely less on manual actions. In short, a business management software will provide you with a single solution to handle all your business needs through a collection of business apps.
What Is Business Management Software?
A business management software provides an integrated suite to manage financials, projects, and customer relationships. This collection of applications will help a business improve upon and automate their existing processes through completing tasks, improving reporting, reducing mistakes, and increasing efficiency. Some business management software may focus more on one area than another, such as CRM or accounting, but almost all will provided a unified way of running your business.
While not a concrete identifier of a business management software, most will include modules such as:
- Project management (including project planning)
- Time tracking
- Accounting (via invoicing, budgeting, and purchase orders)
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Marketing automation (email marketing)
- Credit card processing
- Document management
We’ve taken the time to compile our favorites that can meet these needs and more:
Best Overall:
Scoro
Scoro brings together your team’s projects, sales, finances, and reports. This is accomplished through contact management, calendars, quoting, project management, task management, reporting, invoicing, and an intuitive dashboard. Scoro’s ability to provide all of these features with an equal level of importance at a reasonable price point is why they are our choice as the best overall business management software.
Scoro helps bring structure to you work by overseeing every aspect of your projects, efficiently manage your resources, all while staying on track and under budget. For example, when a customer gets in touch about a project, you can create a quote in just a matter of a few clicks. Just add in specific services or items, and create the quote. Once created, it can easily be converted into calendar tasks and and an invoice that the customer can pay. Your staff can be easily notified of the work expected of them.
Everything you need to know about your projects will be found int he project timeline, including budget details, related sales, finance documents, and future planned activities. Integrated communication tools let you create messages to your staff to catchup on the status of various projects, how your staff is being utilized to complete the project, and much more.
Best for Small Business:
Knack
Knack is a simplistic business management software that provides accounting, project management, CRM, team collaboration, and automation features all in the cloud. It provides all your small business needs to run effectively, so you can avoid administrative and organizational challenges and ensure your sales and accounts with no complications.
Knack will let you quickly issue quotes, invoices, and reports to ensure your business is maximizing revenue. The integrate CRM platform will ensure prospects can quickly become clients without having to enter data in twice. The integrated project management will track all of your tasks, manage the productivity of your staff, track time worked on projects, and more.
The reason Knack stands out as one of the best management tools for small businesses is that it has a free version available. This version can be used forever for up to 3 users. The free version is rather limited (as it offers no automation features), but does include room for unlimited prospects, quotes/invoices, and projects. This is best used by micro businesses. To upgrade to their small business version (the “Pro” version), Knack starts at only $3.95/user/month.
Best Free:
Bitrix24
Bitrix24 is a forever free business management software that gives you access for an unlimited number of users. The biggest draw of Bitrix24 is the powerful CRM tool. In fact, Bitrix24 has it’s roots as just a CRM, but added capabilities for project management, communication, website building, and contact center. Having been around as a cloud software since 2012, Bitrix24 is constantly improving to offer their customers the best free management software available on the market. Today, Bitrix24 markets itself as a “collaboration platform”.
The heart of the software, Bitrix24’s CRM helps you grow sales through improved conversion rates and automated marketing processes. Their tasks and projects features let you create Gantt charts, Kanban boards, track time worked on projects, and plan your future workloads. Internally, Bitrix24 can be used as a communication platform that shows an activity stream, creates group chats for your staff, and creates work groups that lets you view who is assigned to various tasks.
Given it’s availability as a free solution, over 7,000,000 organizations worldwide rely on Bitrix24. They offer both a cloud and on-premise option. Upgrading to a paid version of Bitrix24 will give you access to increased online storage, chat-enabled sales with mobile payment processing, and increased support.
Best Cloud/Online:
Zoho One
Zoho One is a unified suite of business and productivity applications to manage your sales, marketing, customer support, HR, finance, and operations. The main draw of Zoho One is the 40 included business applications that are fully integrated with one another. Rather than purchasing Zoho products individually (such as Zoho Books and Zoho Inventory), Zoho One acts as a bundle, allowing you to have all of those applications unified under one system.
A benefit provided by a unified system includes the ability for one software to communicate data with another. One example includes when a sale has been made–your stock count should update to reflect what is left, and this will help your sales staff from overselling, or allow them to create a purchase order for more goods.
Zoho One stands out as the best cloud business management software due to the sheer number of both web apps and mobile apps it provides. Like other online business management software, users can access critical data on the go via mobile devices. However, many solutions may offer limited or no mobile access to their web based apps. Zoho is a solution that lets you access all of Zoho through one powerful mobile app.
Best for Task Management:
nTask
nTask is a smart task management platform that is built around customer needs. nTask is primarily targeted towards teams, but will work for freelancers and sole proprietors as well. The solution includes tasks, projects, meetings, and timesheets.
List, grid, and calendar views let you easily sort through your open/pending tasks so you and your team know what needs to be prioritized. Priority levels can also help expedite projects and tasks that need more attention than others. If working in a team environment, project statuses can be adjusted to let others know what has not been started, what is in-progress, what needs review, and what has been completed. The Gantt chart feature will give you a visual way of looking into project status. This includes data points such as completion percentage, issues, risks, and costs.
nTask does have a free version available that acts as a great way to test the program out. All versions of nTask include a 14-day free trial, and their most basic paid option starts at only $2.99/user/month, proving that it’s one of the most inexpensive options out there for task management.
What Is Business Management Software?
Business management software is any solution that meets business needs via an integrated set of functionalities or business apps intended to automate and streamline your business process. Similar to ERP solutions, business management software will help you manage projects, create reports, manage clients, and overall increase productivity and provide analytics into how your business can improve in specific areas.
Business management software usually includes functionalities such as CRM, accounting, project management, and invoicing. As a business grows in size, they’ll need advanced functionalities such as human resource management, warehouse management, and more.
Business management software can be used by both small and large businesses. Whether your business has 2 employees or 50 employees, there is a business management software that is right for you. Many business management tools let you add users as time goes on, meaning the software can grow with your business.
Features of Business Management Software
- Invoicing: Create invoices detailing what products or services you’ve sold. Create custom invoices to show your company details, add due dates, any potential taxes or fees, and more. Give customers the ability to pay invoices online.
- Accounting: Tracks financial transactions such as income and expense tracking through a general ledger (GL). Advanced options include tracking payments to vendors via accounts payable (AP) and keeps a customer database of payments received or still awaiting payment in accounts receivable (AR). Additional functionalities include payroll, billing, inventory management, and order management.
- CRM: Customer relationship management via an integrated view of your customers and prospects so you can get the most out of your marketing, sales, and customer service efforts. Includes automation tools such as email marketing.
- Project Management: Tracks real-time progress throughout a project lifecycle, task management via assigning tasks to specific employees, time tracking and pairing worked hours to specific workflows and projects, and clearly described project requirements within the system.
- eCommerce: Integration with websites to provide an online store front. Let customers shop online, view prices, monitor deals, and have your goods delivered straight to their doorstep.
Benefits of Business Management Software
A business management system can be whatever your business needs it to be; from accounting and project management, to a fully-integrated enterprise resource planning software.
Get Work Done Faster and Reduce Errors
Business management software will organize all of your information in an easy to find manner. This means less time spent searching for the correct information. Automation capabilities will also reduce whatever manual efforts are needed in order to create needed documents, print reports, and overall manage your business. This can also reduce mistakes and errors due to human error.
Save Money
An indirect benefit of getting your work done faster is saving money. More automation and less mistakes means you don’t have to pay an employee to handle this work manually. You can also avoid outsourcing tasks to a 3rd party by bringing the functionality in-house.
Some businesses can avoid hiring an employee altogether, which saves thousands each year. For already-employed staff members spending a lot of time managing the business through manual processes, their time will now be better spent working on projects and other revenue-driving activities.
There is also the benefit of reduced IT costs. Using multiple software products to cover specific needs throughout your organization can increase the strain on your IT resources. When you consolidate multiple solutions into one integrated option, you can save on ongoing software costs.
Monitor Productivity of Your Staff and Improve Decision-Making
Business management software lets owners and managers stay on top of employees of tracking the status of projects. Tasks assigned to employees via a project management module can be monitored to see how long employees are taking to handle time-sensitive tasks. Employees that are able to complete work faster can be assigned to more critical tasks, which can give a peace of mind that work will be completed on time.
Having a centralized place to monitor your projects ensures that management personnel can log in and review the status of projects. This eliminates the need to manually track down an employee and speak with them in person for a status update.
Cost of Business Management Software
The price of business management software ranges from $4 to $99/month/user for a subscription-based pricing model. This is most commonly found in cloud-based or web-based business management tools, which are advertised as easy to implement with little to no upfront fees. On-premise solutions will cost as little as $995 one-time to $4,500/one-time/user.
The biggest determination of the cost of business management software will be the types of features needed and the number of desired users. If your business requires additional services, such as migrating your legacy data into the new software, or needs continued ongoing support, you may be looking at additional upfront or recurring costs.