Business Doctor: Sarah Blow, Girl Geek Dinners

Each week, a specialist in a business subject joins us in the studio for 5 live's On The Money to answer your business questions. Sarah Blow, founder of Girl Geek Dinners writes about the advances in technology for small businesses.

There are some great software packages out there for startups right now and some that I would count as really useful core applications to any start up looking for great tools without having to pay a fortune for them! After all every small business is looking for ways to keep costs down whilst they grow.

Yammer - Social Network software. Yammer is like Twitter but for private organisations. You can share messages, links and content privately amongst your team or network. Content is distributed through the Yammer application on your desktop machine, mobile phone or text message.

Google Apps for Business - Gmail, Calendar, Docs & Site for your business needs. These allow the simple sharing within your organisation for your calendars, documents and your website too. You also have the advantage of having Google Chat to communicate with your team from anywhere. Gone are the days where you have to work in the office! The collaboration on documents is particularly handy!

Zoho CRM - Customer Relationship Management system. This system looks after your e-mail lists, customer communications and inventory management. When you get larger it also integrates with sales and accounting ERP systems.

Freshbooks - This invoicing system is simple and helps put together your accounts and also enables simple billing to your customers.

Objective Marketer - Social Media marketing and monitoring software which integrates with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more. It detects who retweets and shares your content and who your "influencers" are along with tracking the number of clicks and scheduling updates. It also allows for automated content distribution.

The types of technology that you should be using in a small business are those that are free or low cost - but that meet the needs of your company. There's no point over-engineering your processes to fit the software that is available. Be sensible and try to use software that saves you time and money. When considering technology, also consider how it will work when your organisation grows, ways to export your system or integrate them with larger services.

It's also well worth looking at some of the large corporates when you are exploring how your business can benefit from software. For example Microsoft runs a service called BizSpark which enables small businesses to use some of their core technologies for their start ups. You need to sign up to get it but you get the software and the benefit of events and support tailored for startups.

If you want to find out more about the latest softwares, tools and technologies being released keep an eye on websites like Mashable.com, TechCruch.com and The Next Web which all regularly feature and focus on both startups and applications that are useful to startups. These sites also let you know about up and coming events along with Eventbrite which is an events service and Enterprise UK which is a govornment backed initiative for startups.

On The Money goes out on 5 live between 8 and 9pm every Sunday night