As time marches on, we find ourselves living in an increasingly automated world. As we find new and more efficient ways to deliver results quicker than ever, pretty much everyone has to find a way to keep up or get left behind.
In the interest of making sure you’re able to stay with the times and remain as productive as possible. And, you don’t have to set aside a ton of money for iOS or Android app development costs to build a custom app to meet your needs. You can use what’s out there already.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular and useful apps you can use to automate your workflow and maximize productivity.
Zapier
Zapier is an incredibly useful tool that serves as a sort of air traffic controller for all the other productivity apps you use, allowing them to integrate with one another even if they’re not explicitly designed to.
Let’s say you’re running a pay website with a subscription service, and you use PayPal to handle the payment/signup portion. Once the transaction completes, PayPal can send a message to Zapier, which will then forward the appropriate information to your website to create an account. When that finishes, your site sends the account info back to Zapier, which will then forward it to your email system to send out an automated signup email to your customer.
This is just one example of the many useful ways Zapier can fill the gaps between the different apps that keep your business running.
Trello
Trello is focused on organization and visualization, specifically related to creative and project work. It not only provides an easy interface to organize and collaborate about ideas, but it also includes many ways to add, remove, and categorize idea cards to plan out your future business and product goals, as well as including visual elements rather than a text-only interface.
Process Street
The ability to create and manage scheduled processes and checklists is what Process Street is all about. It has a simple, drag-and-drop interface that anyone can pick up and learn quickly and easily, and like Zapier, integrates with other applications to provide an additional dimension of automation.
Wunderlist
Any kind of business needs a way of keeping track of tasks and milestones, and Wunderlist provides a slick and easy-to-use interface to accomplish precisely that. Not only can you create, edit, and share lists, but it also can automatically pop reminders and move in tune with planned project milestones.
Nintex
Nintex can combine multiple applications into one, centralized workflow automation. It combines the interoperability of Zapier with the drag-and-drop smoothness of Trello to make automation as easy as cake. Nintex is available in on-premises, cloud-based, and mobile flavors, and provides automated data collection and analysis tools as well.
Conclusion
While every business has different needs and moving parts, the apps mentioned above are a great starting point to increase efficiency, reduce the amount of human touch required to operate, and integrate apps whether they were explicitly designed to do so or not.
Best of all, they also provide the ability to scale and grow with your business, making them essential investments to run your business from startup through growth and beyond.
