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Eight must-have Windows 8 apps for small businesses

These Windows 8 apps are invaluable for small business owners and entrepreneurs who want to simplify their workflow.
By Eileen Brown, Contributor
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Must-have Windows 8 apps

Small businesses running on Windows 8 will find these apps will ease the hassle of running a small business. From stock control to flyer creation these apps should be in daily use on your Windows 8 device.

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Digital menu boards

Small businesses often struggle with digital menu boards and digital signage. My Digital Menu Boards makes it easy for the non-techy build menu boards with ease using your images & videos.

Each menu board can be customised with start and end times. You can add images, image playlists, videos, Foursquare check-ins, RSS feeds, display the current time of day and list other items on the menu screen.

You can easily customise your menu board with the editor. This allows you to customise items such as width, height, rotation, font, alignment, amimations and custom start features.

You can also back your completed board up to make it easy to restore if something goes awry.

Cost: $5.99

Useful for: Browsing antique items in-store, viewing tasting notes and information from wine or beer merchants, getting extra information about cars in the dealerships.

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Easy Invoice Creator

This app makes it really easy to keep track of invoices to different customers and manage the creation of multiple item invoices.

Easy Invoice Creator allows you to look at all of the invoices you have created, add multiple line items for each invoice and save invoices to .pdf files. You can customise invoices by adding your logo and business details and add due dates for payment. You can easily edit invoices after creation and even send the invoice directly to your client.

Cost: $1.99

Useful for: Businesses that can't remember whether they have issued an invoice to a client — or how many invoices are still unpaid.

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POS 8

POS 8 helps small businesses keep track of their inventory. The app lets you manage your produts, decreasing the stock items as they are sold. Products can be uniquely tagged by name, image, manufacturer, category, net and  gross price. 

Easy to edit, you can see how many of each product you have still in stock. Traffic light alerts indicate which items are running low.

Cost: $2.49

Useful for: Small businesses that carry multiple items of stock. Beauty salons, hairdressers, grocers, PC repair stores.

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Easy Flyer Creator

Easy Flyer Creator has over 100 templates for several kinds of business including interior design businesses, door hangers and events companies.

The templates are really easy for the non techy to use and lets you add barcodes or QR codes to the finished document without any complex configuration. You can print off discount coupons or seasonal event posters and save the output in formats such as JPG and BMP.

Cost: Free with ads (Retail price $39.99)

Useful for: Small businesses that need to produce coupons or flyers on a regular basis and do not have the budget to bring in design shops each time.

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Saleswah Lite CRM

This CRM solution for small businesses makes it really easy to run a CRM system and get a good understanding of your sales pipeline, deals and outstanding tasks. You can import your contacts from Linkedin, Microsoft Live, Gmail or Yahoo, connect contacts to deals and schedule tasks.

You can see how many deals you still have to close, the value of each contact and manage the progress of each deal through each stage through to close. This is a really intuitive app that works across timezones.

Cost: Free

Useful for: Small businesses that need to manage multiple different deals and calculate progress through the sales funnel.

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Simple Ledger

Simple Ledger enables you to use double entry accounting to manage your transactions. The simple interface enables you to see all of your individual ledger entries, debits and credits. You can look at all individual accounts, debits and credits and see your transactions on one screen.

Cost: Free

Useful for: Small businesses that want to save as much money as possible by minimising the work that their accountant needs to do.

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Stock Pilot

Stock Pilot enables small businesses to manage inventory and track orders. Its advantage is in enabling the business owner to keep control of stock and manage inventory without over spending on stock that is not quickly needed.

You can get insight into your customer purchases allowing you to target your marketing to customers that buy particular items from you. When an item of stock falls below a user defined level you are alerted to buy more of that item. You can also track your pending orders and manage alert items.

Cost: $41.99

Useful for: Small businesses that need to keep tight control of their stock amounts and spend only on items that are used regularly.

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World Survey Kit

This kit enables you to collect customer data from your customers, employees and prospects. You can format the questionaires in multiple formats such as quizzes, surveys, polls and open ended feedback questions.

The data is collated and displayed in tables and lists for analysis.

Cost: Free

Useful for: Any business that needs to manage customer satirfaction and preception, track and respond to  customer issues and maintain good connections to customers.

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