You don't need a big IT budget to save serious time. Here are five tools that small business owners are using right now — most of them free or very cheap — to cut down on the repetitive work that eats into their week.
1. Zapier (or Make)
If you find yourself copying information from one place to another — say, from an email into a spreadsheet, or from a form into your CRM — Zapier can do that automatically. You set it up once, and it just runs in the background.
Good for: Connecting apps that don't talk to each other natively.
Cost: Free tier available. Paid from around £20/month.
2. Notion
A lot of small businesses are still running on a mix of Word documents, email threads, and shared drives that nobody can find anything in. Notion brings it all into one place — notes, tasks, wikis, databases — and it's genuinely easy to use.
Good for: Getting your team on the same page without a complicated project management tool.
Cost: Free for small teams.
3. Calendly
Stop the back-and-forth of trying to find a meeting time. Calendly lets people book time in your calendar directly, based on when you're actually free. It sounds small, but if you're booking a lot of calls, it saves a surprising amount of time.
Good for: Anyone who books meetings regularly.
Cost: Free tier available.
4. ChatGPT (or Claude)
AI tools have moved well beyond the hype. Used properly, they can draft emails, summarise long documents, write first drafts of proposals, and answer questions about your business — in seconds. The key is learning how to ask them the right questions.
Good for: Drafting, summarising, and thinking through problems.
Cost: Free tier available. Paid from around £16/month.
5. Google Workspace (if you're not already on it)
If your business is still using a mix of personal Gmail accounts and local files, moving to Google Workspace gives you shared drives, proper business email, and collaboration tools that actually work together. It's not glamorous, but it's the foundation everything else sits on.
Good for: Getting a proper, reliable tech foundation in place.
Cost: From around £5/user/month.
None of these require a technical background to set up. If you're not sure which of these would make the biggest difference for your business, send me a message — I'm happy to point you in the right direction.