Business & entrepreneurship
Do you have an international business? Here are 5 free amazing apps you need to try
These tools will make your life so much easier
The feeling you get when closing your first deal with an overseas customer is hard to explain. Only those who’ve made the efforts, tore down the language barriers, took care of the legal obstacles, and still managed to reach an agreement know how hard and rewarding it is.
The same goes for handling a remote-first team, especially regarding communication. Time zones, languages, and availability often collide with a fluent teamwork dynamic.
Fortunately, there are lots of useful tools to help you sort out all the obstacles and harness the maximum potential of having an international business, market, and team.
Here is a selection of 5 favorites of ours:
1. Stripe: International payments and products management
You could say that Stripe is a payments application, but it’s much more than that. It lets you handle all of your customers, finances, products, and so much more.
From managing your taxes to creating direct links to charge for specific products and services, Stripe lets you automate every single operation that involves a transaction. This includes requesting payments, generating an invoice, mounting up an e-commerce store, and everything else.
Additionally, it has a built-in currency conversion tool to streamline deals with customers overseas — they pay in their currency, you receive it in yours. It’s just wonderful!
Add that to an analytics dashboard, reporting features, and the tons of other integrations you can do with Stripe and you have a digital accountant doing all your work for you — for free!
There’s no chance you can miss it. Try Stripe now here.
2. Revolut Business: Multi-currency banking and expenses cards
An online, paperless bank for all-things money, Revolut allows you to handle your incomes and expenses from your phone, showing every transaction you’ve performed as soon as you open the app.
Additionally, you can invite your team members, create groups, assign cards for each area’s expenses — for example, each team leader can have its own card with specific settings, so they can cover their needs instantly without having to wait for authorizations.
You can create as many cards for as many purposes as you want, plus accept payments in multiple currencies and convert within the app. And to top it all up, Revolut offers you benefits and discounts on platforms small businesses commonly use, like Shhopify, Fiverr, AWS, and social media ads.
So what are you waiting for? Open a free account on Revolut here.
3. Slack: Fluent communication through topic-specific channels
Slack is like your regular messaging application on steroids. Not only does it have a smooth, simple interface that allows you to navigate all your conversations easily. It lets you create different channels for all kinds of topics.
Each Slack channel can be configured on its own, contain different members of your team, equipped with bots that perform automated functions such as sending alerts, and so on.
Slack is also well optimized for distributed teams, as each member can set the time zone they’re located in, work hours, and status; and the app will always show if that person is currently on, working, or available at the time.
However, the distinctive feature about slack is organization chat. You can actually create conversations and shared spaces with other entire companies or groups. This makes it extremely simple to manage partnerships, agreements, settlements, and basically everything you have to discuss with one or more people from another organization.
All in all, Slack is basically like digital headquarters for your team. If you’ve been having trouble with internal organization and communications, you must definitely give it a try!
Learn more about Slack in this link.
4. ClickUp: Seamless project management for your whole team
ClickUp makes task and project management super easy through a smooth user interface and extensive functionality. No matter how globally distributed your team is, what time zones they manage, and when they’re available, ClickUp lets you set priorities, organize tasks, and let all your team know about the state of ongoing projects, all in one place.+
Through different work spaces, your team can see all the tasks, to-dos, and responsibilities assigned to them as soon as they log in. They can also let the rest of the team know when they need assistance by assigning sub-tasks and dependencies and using mentions and comments in every task or project.
With proper use of ClickUp’s functions, you can achieve efficient and fluent teamwork without time zones or availability being a problem. Your team can effortlessly take care of their tasks as shown by the application, mark them as completed for the rest of the team to know, and simply move on to the next thing.
You can get started with ClickUp at zero-cost through this link.
5. Binance: Cryptocurrency exchanging and management
Cryptocurrencies are one of the most relevant and innovative technologies for international payments. With an internet connection and a wallet address, you can accept payments from anyone, anywhere in the world and receive it in a few minutes.
More importantly, crypto transactions are censorship resistant and irreversible, so no more worrying about your credit card being canceled or your bank rejecting your wire transfer.
Although the world is still getting used to cryptocurrencies, small business owners and entrepreneurs in vulnerable economies are starting to realize the benefits of using them for payments.
In that scenario, Binance provides the most professional platform for cryptocurrency portfolio management, exchanging, and investments. Additionally, they offer their own credit and debit card for spending and expenses, over-the-counter services, launchpads, and countless other services for business.
Opening a Binance account is free and you can do so through the following link.
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