In the past, businesses relied on paper and writing as well as typing to keep records straight throughout the years. Many things have changed due to the recent advances in technology and keeping paper records is now a thing of the past. There are many ways to keep electronic records that take up almost no space at all and do not cost an arm and a leg. Paying for storage for all of these records in the past may have prompted business loans, but things have changed quite dramatically.

There are many available tools that can help you in different situations, but 7 of them are essential to the smooth running of any business in this day and age. EchoSign is a resource that can help you deal with the many contracts you have to print out and have signed. The program can help you fill them out electronically and distribute them to the necessary parties for signing. Before, where you might have had 10 or 20 copies floating around, now, you have just a single file with all of the pertinent information. CutePDF is another program that helps save paper as it can transform any document or webpage into a PDF. This saves you the time to convert these types of files for future use.

Faxing is the process of sending documents over a phone line. Previously, you had to print the document out and scan it electronically to be sent to another fax machine where it was printed out once again, effectively wasting paper. Now, eFax is a new tool that eliminates the need for all of the printing and does all of the faxing electronically on the computer, which can save time as well as quite a bit of paper. Most email clients have limits on the size of files you can send, but there is a tool that can get around this type of limitation. YouSendIt allows you to host large files and send links to them for clients. This alleviates having to burn the file to a CD or flash drive to mail it out.

With all of this focus on the computer for business, wouldn’t it be horrible if your main server crashed and you no longer had any of this important information? That is where Mozy fits in. Mozy is a backup program that works effortlessly without interruption in the background, backing your information up so that it can be easily recovered if there is a horrible crash of this type. Dropbox is a new program that is an amazing tool for any small business. Dropbox allows you to have access to files that are normally stored on your computer, anywhere. You simply drop the files in your public folder and retrieve them from anywhere. You can also share files easily in this manner by sending a friend or client a link to the file that is located in your public folder and wa-la, it’s there for them in an instant.