Free Tools & Services for Businesses

Have you ever wanted to make your life just a bit easier? Ever wanted to get more work done in less time? Well, when it comes to certain tasks, there are some great online tools and services available that will help you knock them out with ease and style. 

Here's a list of some of my favorite free tools. They're great for business and personal use. In a way, this list serves a purpose for me too: I can't lose it if it's here. 

Hope you get as much out of these as I do.

Scheduling & Reminders

Google Calendar: Book appointments and special dates. The best part of Google's calendar service is that I can set it to send me text reminders at different intervals: weeks, days, hours, or minutes before whatever it is I've scheduled. You can create multiple calendars to share with others and there's also a great RSVP feature. 

Accounting & Money Management

Freshbooks: "Focus on your work, not your paperwork. The fastest way to track time, organize expenses, & invoice your clients." This is an invoicing system that lets you plug in expenses and even generate branded invoices for clients. Freshbooks has free and paid plans.

Mint: "Mint brings all your financial accounts together online or on your mobile device, automatically categorizes your transactions, lets you set budgets and helps you achieve your savings goals." My favorite feature is how Mint breaks down expenses by services (food, fuel, office supplies etc) and even keeps an eye out on better credit card interest rates and offers. 

File-sharing & Storage

Dropbox: "Any file you save to Dropbox also instantly saves to your computers, phones, and the Dropbox website." You get up to 2GB of free storage (with paid subscriptions that go up to 100GB). What's great is that you can use this service to share files with others. 

Screensharing & Virtual Meetings

Join.me: "Get everybody on the same page, when they're not in the same room, instantly. Review documents and designs. Train staff. Demo products or just show off. join.me is a ridiculously simple screen sharing tool for meetings on the fly." This has come in handy plenty of times. It's great for walking someone through how to use particular programs. It's free, but there's a paid upgrade that boasts tons of features. So far, the free version has done wonders for me.

FreeConferenceCall: Log on, book a time, and you get a special phone number with an access code. Share the number and code with those you want to hold a conference call with, and everyone is all set.

Skype: It's likely you've heard of Skype, which lets you do text, voice, and video chatting worldwide. However, you can share your screen with others, exchange files, and even record chats.

Google Plus (Hangouts): Google Plus has some great chatting features. The Hangout is one of them. Voice, video, text, and screensharing available. An added bonus of the hangout is that you can also view youtube videos with others simultaneously and collaborate on documents.

Image Manipulation & Screenshots

Picnik: "Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames." I like this because it lets me edit images on the fly for sharing through email or social networking sites. Quickly upload, crop, resize, and edit images. 

Screenr: "Just click the record button, capture your screen & voice, and share the link."  Do a quick video of what's going on with your computer screen, create a link, and share it with anyone you want. It's pretty simple.

Skitch: "Annotate, edit and share your screenshots and images…fast." Basically, you can pull up an image, or take a snapshot of your screen and add lines, text, arrows etc. The desktop version is Mac only for now, but they have mobile apps for iPhone and Android. 

Jing: "Create images and videos of what you see on your computer screen, then share them instantly!" Best of all, you don't have to save any of it to your computer. Jing can upload the content, and give you a link that you can share with others. 

File-Conversions

Convertfiles: "Free online file converter and YouTube video downloader. Convert videos, audio files, documents, and ebooks." Sometimes you get files that can't be opened up by programs when they're in a particular format. Convertfiles lets you upload the file, select what format you want to turn it into, then it converts it for you.

Bookmarking/Research

Evernote: "Never forget a thing." I love evernote. I have it on my desktop and on my phone. It lets you send text or audio notes, and files. You can even clip portions of websites to it while adding notes, tags, and titles for yourself. It's great for bookmarking websites that you want to visit later, or even for doing research because you can create folders to organize all of your web clippings or highlights. This let me get rid of tons of business cards that were adding clutter. I just took pictures of them with my phone and uploaded all of them to Evernote. Although it isn't 100% accurate yet, text within images is searchable too. 

Delicious: This is a social bookmarking site. You can download extensions and bookmarklets that let you save your favorite sites or sites that you want to check out later. 

BagTheWeb: Make a collection of links and put them together in a list to share with others. For example, you could be planning a trip somewhere, and you want to share all the interesting links about destination spots with someone else. BagTheWeb is great for that. 

Computer Performance

AVG Free: Free antivirus software

Microsoft Essentials: Guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

Spybot Search & Destroy: This searches and gets rid of spyware on your computer.

RKill: This kills harmful processes that may be slowing down your computer so that your normal security software can run and clean your computer of infections.

CCleaner: Clean your Windows PC. Erases temporary internet files, cookies, and registry files that aren't being used. CCleaner has a great uninstall software feature for cleaning your system of programs you don't want anymore.  

Interesting Content & Articles

Alltop: Considered to be an online magazine rack. You find the topic that interests you, and Alltop curates content from some of the top blogs in those industries.

Phone Service

Google Voice: Free for those with Gmail or other Google accounts. Think of it as one number which can be forwarded to multiple phones simultaneously. What you get is a solution to missed calls: they don't have to happen anymore. Other great features include transcriptions of your voicemails and call screening.

Deals

Groupon: Great deals on products, services, and fun things to do locally. 

AppSumo: Daily deals on web tools and services. 

Productivity

RescueTime: This stays in the background as you use your computer. It lets you know how you spend your time, and can provide you with the tools you need to be more effective while at the computer.

Voyurl (In Beta): This also stays in your background. It logs every website you visit and how much time you spend. Then, it tells you which sites you spend the most time on. 

AskMeEvery: This is a nice self-tracking application. You specify the question, and this application will text you every day (at the same time) with the question you told it to ask you. "How much did I spend today?" or "How many miles did I drive?" It graphs the information over time for you.

That's it. Hope some of these help you out. If you feel I've left out any other great tools, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.