Working from home often leaves you without a lot of the administrative help and tools that are available in a traditional office environment.

Although your job may not come equipped with the necessary admin tools, the digital marketplace has an abundance of options to keep you organized – as well as efficient. Read along for some of the top administrative tools to make working from home much more effective.

Basecamp

Basecamp is a project management tool that is web-based. It allows you to work much more effectively in a team environment, as well as keep track of tasks and items to do.  Although Basecamp would keep any work from home employee on task, it’s especially great for teams. You can create collaborative to do lists, check off tasks, assign tasks to others, and so on. It’s a place to see everything in one place, as well as easily add your input, files, photos, and so on, to any discussion or project. Basecamp offers a free trial and then starts at $20/month.

Trello is a similar project management tool that also allows you to collaborate and keep to do lists organized.

Billings

When you work from home, you often have to create and send your own invoices, as well as keep track of your time. Another difficult task can be finding this type of program for a Mac – this is where Billings comes in.  It’s a downloadable program that allows you to track time on your desktop, as well as send invoices and manage your clients in one place.

Billings is also affordable, ranging from $5-10 per month, and you can backup your past invoices to your computer.  Overall, the program allows a simple method for tracking your time, sending invoices, and managing your financial workspace in one simple application.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool.  Another tool that’s also excellent for groups, Sprout is a useful tool for anyone posting to numerous social media profiles and accounts. Link your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn business and personal, Google+ business and personal pages, and so on.  

This way, you can schedule posts, post to more than one profile at a time, and even pull reports. With the click of a few buttons, you can export detailed reports for yourself or for your clients. This allows them to see crucial data in a simplistic way, as well as beneficial information for comparison of campaign effectiveness.  You can see interesting things such as location and gender of followers, new followers over the time frame requested, and which day is most popular for posts on that particular page.

Hootsuite is a similar social media management tool that allows you to schedule postings across various profiles and accounts.

Evernote

Evernote is the place for all of your ideas to become organized and also presented, if need be.  It’s designed to be a place for you to take and organize notes, archive them, write lists, clip articles from the internet, and so on.  It also allows you to create presentations from your notes (without creating slides), making it an ideal business collaboration tool as well.

It’s helpful to have a place to keep all of your notes and web interests, making it an organizational dream and productivity tool.