When we started Seedr Creative we knew that to be successful we had to use the best and most cost-effective business tools available to us. Thankfully with so many great and affordable business apps and SaaS solutions out there this is entirely possible for small businesses. Here's a selection of the ones we use that make our working lives a lot easier, and in some instances make work a lot more of a pleasure!

Accounting and finances How much do I love FreeAgent? About as much as I was frightened of accounting, tax, expenses and all that scary finance stuff. FreeAgent makes it almost a pleasure. As a Limited Company of course we have an accountant, but the day to day managing of our finances is all handled beautifully by FreeAgent. Invoicing, estimates, expenses, banking and much more is easy to control via a dashboard. There's also an extensive knowledgebase you can tap into.
Type: Monthly subscription SaaS 
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Project Management Like millions of others we use Basecamp from 37 signals. With Seedr being based in two different locations it's even more important that we have a place to share all information, files, discussions and to-do lists relating to the projects. Basecamp's recent redesign makes it even easier to use.
Type: Monthly subscription SaaS
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Customer Relationships For small business CRM the natural partner to Basecamp is another 37 Signals product called Highrise. That's where all our information about customer interactions go. Like Basecamp it's easy to use and you can interact with it via email messages. Free basic accounts are available too.
Type: Monthly subscription SaaS
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Presentations I used to work at a biggish company who used Microsoft products for everything so naturally I grew a healthy and intense dislike for PowerPoint 2003. Before I convinced them to get me a Mac and learned to love Keynote I found a lovely little online presentation tool called SlideRocket. I still love it and still use it occasionally. It's growing in reputation and it's easy to see why: super-easy to embed and share, nice transitions, mobile friendly viewing, and download presentation options.
Type: Monthly subscription SaaS
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Writing If you write you need IAWriter basically. I bash out blog posts and other marketing content in this lovely and inexpensive digital writing tool that removes all the clutter and gives you only what you need to create great stories out of words. Mac, iPad and iPhone versions available.
Type: Desktop and mobile application
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Documents You wouldn't expect a word processing tool from Apple to be anything other than a joy to work with. Pages has a lot of great features, but put the real advantage is in how easy it is to learn and use. Mac and iOs versions.
Type: Desktop and mobile application
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Spreadsheets Numbers is Apple's tool for spreadsheets. I'm not a number cruncher but find Numbers easier to use than Excel and was quickly up and running with some basic formulas and tables.
Type: Desktop and mobile application
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This is just a selection of the tools that we use help us run our business smoothly and efficiently.