When you own a business, time becomes a very important commodity. You don’t want to waste it on trivial tasks and you’re constantly trying to find ways to get the most out of what little time you do have. Many companies are aware of this and offer many valuable tools to business owners. However, not all tools are created the same.

Below are five of the best time saving tools for small businesses.

1. Rescue Time

This is a great tool to monitor what websites you are spending the most time on throughout the week. All you need to do is to specify to the tool what websites are productive uses of your time and what are not. The tool will monitor what websites you visit throughout the day and at the end of the week you can see where you are losing the most time and can then trim the fat accordingly. You may be surprised to see what websites are costing you the most time throughout the week.

2. Google Docs

Google Docs allows you to upload documents to the cloud in an organized fashion that you can easily access at a later date. Not only can you place documents in Google Docs, but you can use it to store your presentations as well. This is a great tool as it ties in with the rest of your Google applications, like Gmail, and it won’t even cost you a cent.

3. Catch The Best

This tool allows you to collaborate with other members of your team when it comes to hiring new help for your business. This tool allows you to share and track resumes and job applications with the rest of your team to ensure you hire the best person for the job.

4. Phone Tag

Many mobile devices translate missed calls and voice messages to text these days, however; many small businesses could benefit from the convenience of a voice to text translation service. That’s where PhoneTag comes in. This tool will translate voice messages to text for you so won’t have to replay the message multiple times to get all the important details from the call. This tool even delivers an MP3 of the message just in case something is lost in the translation process.

5. Brand Yourself

If you have a new business or are concerned about your reputation online with your current business, BrandYourself can help boost your website in the search engines. Brandyourself offers a free service that boosts up to three links of your website up past bad or irrelevant reviews. You can even use it to blast past the competition on Google. The paid version of this tool offers more services for boosting more links and profile pages like WordPress, Flickr, Pinterest, and others.

Now that you have all these great tools at your disposal for your business, you have no more excuses for wasting time. Be sure to check out the free versions of these tools as well as paid versions although it may not be as cost effective or useful.