Budget Friendly Office Gadgets

Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

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Print Ready

Small Business Saturday has come and gone (and we hope it was a huge success for everyone), but the holiday season is just getting warmed up. If you are in need of some smart gift ideas for the small business owner in your life… or you would like to make a “happy holidays to me” purchase, these are some of the most innovative and affordable office gadgets we’ve seen.

3-D Printing for the Masses

Let’s be honest, 3-D printing is really cool. Unless you’re up for the task of building your own printer from a kit, a 3-D printer has likely been a bit too pricey for your budget. Not any more! Touted as a product that delivers in a big way on both reliability and easy-to-use simplicity, the affordable (At US$399), Wi-Fi-enabled New Matter’s MOD-t is both eco-friendly and fully capable of producing things like card holders, wall mount clips, and book ends.

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Print Is Not Dead

If you can wait until May 2016, you’ll be print ready anytime, anywhere (with a wireless connection, of course) with the ZutaLabs Pocket Printer. Able to deliver 1-page per minute (300 dpi) in black ink, this wireless printer has battery enough to print for one hour. If you pre-order you’ll get a break on the price–$199 versus $249.00.

 

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Checking for Duplicate Records

Insightly checks for duplicate contacts and organizations when you enter them manually and when you import them. See Duplicate checks when importing for the methods used to prevent imported duplicates.

When you manually enter a contact or organization, Insightly will check for duplicates after you’ve entered the full name of an organization or a contact. The system will search your existing records when you move your cursor to another field.

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If your company uses Leads, the contact detection will also check if the new contact matches any leads. To compensate for spelling variations or data entry errors, Insightly looks for names that sound like the name you’ve entered and will display up to 5 possible duplicates.

If you see a warning with the maximum 5 matches, check your contacts or organizations to make sure there aren’t more.

This week’s tip was provided by Tony Roma, Insightly’s Technical and UX Writer. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.

 

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Power Up and Scan, Road Warrior

 

Scanning

If you deal with a lot of contracts and documents and want to store them electronically, scanning is a huge time saver. At US$90, the Canon CanoScan LiDE 220 rates as one of the “fastest, most accurate, and most intuitive flatbed scanner for everyday users,” by the guru product reviewers at Endgadget. Rating highly in areas such as crisp, clean scans and accurate text recognition, the 3.4 pound LiDE 220 won’t take up much space or break the bank.

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Going Solar

If your business takes you on the road, keeping track of car chargers, adaptors, and cables is hard enough. Finding yourself with a dead battery and no ready source for charging can really ruin your day. Not so with the HELIOS SMART™ (US$119) which collects and stores energy from a built-in solar panel. Better still, it stores enough energy to fully charge your tablet or smart phone 3-times over.

Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around.Free-trial-button
Send Us Your Tips. Would you like to share your tips with Insightly customers? Send them to us! If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card! Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.

About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.