Adobe Acrobat
What to look for in apps for small business owners.
A small business can be fast, agile and flexible with the right apps.
The perks of being a small business.
It can be a challenge to run a small business, but small firms and startups have an important advantage over more established organisations. Large and long-standing businesses usually have to contend with older systems that don’t keep up with current technology or business practices.
Mobile, agile and on-the-go small business apps.
If you’re a small business owner, you wear a lot of hats. A small business owner might routinely leave the office or shop front to meet with contractors, customers or potential partners. However, you still need to be available. Flexible managers need to jump into action, even if all they have is an iPhone or tablet.
Small businesses (and their owners) are everywhere, so their apps need to be as well. The apps you rely on need to move with you and they need to work on desktops, iOS or Android smartphones and tablets or iPads. Leaving work to attend a meeting shouldn’t interrupt workflow. Everything you use should be purpose-built for mobile devices, capable of working in the cloud and staying up to date in real time.
How Acrobat fills small business needs.
Small business owners and managers need to stay in touch, stay organised and stay secure. Acrobat helps them do all three, with functionality and features created for an agile entrepreneur.
1. Stay in touch.
Managers need to be available throughout the workday for their team and every business relies on forums that foster collaboration. Acrobat is as much about communication as it is about documents. Multiple users can simultaneously leave comments, track feedback and note changes right in a document.
Collaboration makes every team project easier and it isn’t limited to just who’s in your organisation. You can also bring in contractors, freelancers, business partners, vendors or other parties who need to collaborate on a document and know your work is secure.
2. Stay organised.
A big part of project management is keeping everyone on a team on the same page. Logistics, scheduling, time tracking and staying on top of important documents gets complex fast. Even small teams need to keep everything organised so they don’t miss due dates. Everything needs to be categorised and searchable and the best apps let you categorise documents in multiple ways.
Adobe Document Cloud shops and organises essential small business files. Create folders and systems for projects, departments or employees and quickly find anything you need by searching based on file name and filtering by date modified or file size.
3. Stay secure.
Financial matters can take up an immense amount of a business owner’s time. And any records that reference cash flow, monthly fees, pricing, an accounting app or payment apps must be safe and secure. That’s even more true for particularly sensitive information, like W-9 tax forms.
With Acrobat, you can protect sensitive information like bank accounts and credit card payments in a variety of ways — and protecting documents with passwords is only the beginning.
Acrobat empowers small business owners with customisable security features to protect their private financial information and records. You can restrict printing, editing and copying access for important documents, redact sensitive documents such as expense reports or revenue statements and make sure that people who need to view your financial documents don’t see more than you want them to.
Features of Acrobat that can help small businesses.
The best way to determine whether or not an app will help you to run your small business is to consider its features and how well it helps you to accomplish your business goals while improving your day-to-day processes. Take a look at how each of its features makes Adobe Acrobat one of the best apps for small businesses:
1. Edit
Collaboration can be a hurdle even for a small team. Acrobat can make collaboration easier because your team can edit text and images and initiate conversations with comments right in the PDF. Your files can keep up with a team working on the go, in multiple locations, in real time, on desktop or on mobile devices.
2. Create
Turning a file into a PDF can give it the extra polish that a small business needs to present information to customers or partners in a professional and organised way. Convert any file into a PDF, including Word, PowerPoint and Excel files. Create and then convert flyers, menus, lists of services or any other document in PPT and then convert to PDF for beautiful digital and print materials that will amplify your brand.
3. Export
You might need to access and edit an existing PDF in a different format to make adjustments or give a presentation. Adobe Acrobat lets you export to Word, PPT, Excel or JPG.
4. Sign
The cost of paper and the time it takes to process paperwork might become a major problem for a small business. With e-signatures, you can speed up the time it takes to get approvals for any project. You can also create a form to collect data for your own research or gather customer information.
5. Organise
In the day-to-day operations of running a business, you don’t want to lose too much time to activities like filing and searching through files for a piece of information. Also, for the sake of accounting, the ability to keep tidy financial records is crucial for a small business’s survival. Acrobat can help you to keep financial records in order when you organise documents digitally — making it easy to search spreadsheets, receipts, payments, expense reports and other documents for tax or billing information. You can delete pages, rotate pages (such as copies of receipts) to portrait or landscape mode, reorder pages and extract PDF pages.
6. Share & Protect
Security and privacy can come at a high cost for small businesses and you might feel like your original ideas are fair game on the Internet, but with this feature, you can easily add protections to a PDF that prevent copying, editing or printing. When you do want to share, it’s easy with the Share tool. You can also collect feedback when you send for comments and unlock a document when you need to do so.
7. Mobile Apps
These days, a huge share of business transactions and communications are happening via mobile devices rather than desktop computers. With the Adobe Acrobat Reader and Adobe Scan apps, you can scan anything to create a PDF, as well as comment on and share PDFs on the go. To deal with paper bills that can get lost in the shuffle or cost you valuable time in manual data entry and filing, quickly turn them into PDFs with the mobile scanning app. You can then save the file in a searchable format.
Speed up student success with digital transformation.
California State University, Fullerton has been teaching students about technology since 1957. Unfortunately, many of the documents that the school relied on were not high tech and the school still relied on paper documents and physical signatures.
By adopting e-signatures powered by Adobe Acrobat, CSU Fullerton was able to reduce paper usage by 50%, increase efficiency and support their students, even in the grip of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
Make Adobe Acrobat a partner in your small business.
A daily task for small business owners is to create, edit, share and manage documents. Those tasks need to flow as smoothly as possible to reduce friction, save time and let you focus on what truly matters to your business, rather than wrangle problems with software or tech.
Acrobat is the smooth, multi-device document app that’s as nimble as you are and that’s ready to handle just as many essential tasks.
