Resources & Tools

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I highly recommend all of the products and services listed on this page. And I’ve put a heart ❤️️ by the ones I love the most.

This page contains a few affiliate links to products. I may receive a commission for purchases made through these links at no cost to you.

Proposals, Contracts, & Invoices

Dubsado

As a service-based business, Dubsado has been a great tool to help manage the entire process from the contract to the final invoice, and so much more. It saves me a lot of time as I manage my clients and while it might not be the easiest platform to learn, it’s highly customizable and super powerful. And once you have something setup, it’s setup forever and you can repeat it over and over again!

Click here to start your no-time-limit free trial today and get 20% off your first month or year!

Honeybook

I love Honeybook - though it's not what I use for my own project management. I highly recommend it if you're just starting out in business and want an easy to set up, all in one customer relationship management tool. They excellent UI/UX and a great support team. It's a really top notch product!

Try it out here!

Curious which is the better option for your business?

I've been a longtime Dubsado user, but I also love Honeybook. Check out this post where I go over a few of the key differences.

Accounting

YNAB ❤️

You Need A Budget is THE tool that helped me establish the financial confidence to start working for myself full-time. Their online software is a bit different than their older software I have installed on my computer.

I love it for our family budgeting - it makes me feel 100% in control of my money and makes the budgeting so much easier as I assign each of my dollars to their purpose.

Get started with your free trial here!

Xero Bookkeeping

So this is one that you don’t hear about often, but I totally love it. It’s really similar to Quickbooks, but a lot more customizable. I want to track separate types of income and more granular level expenses and found I couldn’t do that with Quickbooks. This allows me to setup all the categories I want so I can track in a way that works for me and my accountant.

YNAB, or You Need A Budget is the one tool I credit for helping be confident enough to make the leap to full-time employment. Read more about it here, but please note that the current software has changed a bit from what I show in the post. I'm currently using their legacy software as long as I'm able to!

Time Tracking

Toggl

When your time equals money, tracking your time is an invaluable source of accountability as a service-based business. By focusing on eliminating your time wasters and becoming more efficient, you can easily increase scale your service based business. (Yep, you read that right!)

Scheduling

Calendly ❤️️

With new leads, current clients, and coffee dates, Calendly makes it easy for others to schedule an appointment with you. It’s the cleanest and most efficient UI and UX I’ve found for a scheduling tool. Totally worth the paid option if you have multiple appointment types.

Project Management

Asana

When it comes to managing your business, there are SO many pieces to keep track of. Clients, marketing, operations ...the list goes on. With Asana, you can easily keep track of all the pieces in an easy to organize project management tool.

ClickUp ❤️️

Where do I begin!? ClickUp is the most highly customizable project manager I've ever used! It can be overwhelming if you're new to project management so I definitely recommend starting with Asana or Trello if you're just getting your feet wet.

Social Media

Later ❤️️

To say it’s hard for me to wrap my head around posting on Instagram would be an understatement. I am a champion overthinker and Later lets me get my thoughts out where I’m best at it - on my computer. I can schedule for a few days out and then I’m surprised and delighted when I get an alert that a new post has been posted to my account!

Bulk schedule, assign hashtags, and manage your posts easily with Later! It is the #1 Instagram Scheduler on the market and rightfully so! I love that I can save groups of hashtag sets to mix and match on my posts.

Website Design & Development

Hover ❤️

Hover is my favorite domain provider I’ve ever worked with. And I worked with a lot through my years at agencies. With amazing customer service, fantastic UI and UX (do you see a pattern here?), free WHOIS privacy to ensure your information is protected, what more could you ask for in a domain provider? Seriously, if I’m raving about a domain provider of all the banal things in the world, it’s gotta be good.

Oh and if you're like me and bad with tech stuff - their support is excellent.

Flywheel ❤️

Flywheel managed WordPress hosting has free migrations, back-ups, SSL certificates, and so much more...you cannot go wrong with them for hosting.

And again, excellent UI/UX, and a top notch support team.

Elementor ❤️

This is my preferred WordPress builder and rightfully so! Elementor allows me to create beautifully designed websites that look great on every device and are easy for my clients to manage. With endless features, you can bring your vision to life easily with their PRO version.

Stock Photos

RawPixel

This is one of my favorite places to find premium images to use for branding boards, social media posts, and more. They have exclusive images - some FREE - which makes their collection different from every other stock photo website out there!

Get a month of free premium membership with this link!

Styled Stock Society  ❤️

These stock photos are not only stylish but also pair so well with my client’s needs! You can easily purchase the membership or just individual stock photo bundles. Psssh there are also some free images you can download too!

Moyo Studio ❤️

MOYO has loads of beautiful images and mockups with plenty of white space for text. Their aesthetic is firmly rooted in classic design and minimalism, combined with natural materials, botanicals and quality handcrafted goods. MOYO serves style conscious entrepreneurs with both practical and versatile images alongside photo based design tools.

Other Tools

Pirate Ship ❤️️

If you’re shipping anything for your business (or personal life) you should sign up for Pirate Ship. It’s a free shipping software that gets you the cheapest USPS shipping rates. And it's easy to sign up so you can easily start shipping right away.

I use it when I send out client gifts or sell things on eBay and their customer service is top notch (and pirate themed). For those with an e-commerce business, this will also link to your shop, too!

ShortPixel ❤️

If you have a website that has images (pretty much every site) ShortPixel will make all the difference in your site’s speed. It’s an image optimization and compression tool that allows you to keep the quality of your images while squishing the size down to almost nothing so they load WAY faster! It’s a no brainer for those who are constantly uploading portfolio items!

So, these are some of the things out there that I like and love to use on a day-to-day basis.

 

I’d love to know what some of your favorites are or if you have something even better than the things on my list.

 

Send me a message over on Instagram!

Check out the blog for more tips on how to build your biz!