With only 24 hours in a day, wouldn’t it be great if you could automate some of the minute-munching business work and take back that time to reinvest in your business, your family or your hobby? Good news–there are some excellent tools available today that can help you do exactly that. If you own an appointment-based business like a dental office, auto shop, spa or salon, this article is dedicated to helping you get back your time.

1. inDinero – Automate your bookkeeping

What Mint does for your personal finances, inDinero does for your business finances. It allows you to spend less time with bookkeeping and more time running your business. This tool automatically download your transactions and balances from all of your business’ financial accounts and then categorizes them into the right buckets. Instead of contacting your accountant and waiting for a response, you can simply log in to your inDinero account to view all the metrics that matter to you. Like a superhuman accountant, inDinero also monitors any irregular account activities, 24/7.

2. Demandforce D3 – Automate your customer communication

If you are already a Demandforce customer, you know how easy it is to use D3 to manage customer interactions automatically. Scheduling and canceling appointments, sending reminders, and even collecting feedback and feeding them to Google on your behalf. If you’re a business that takes appointments, D3 can help you significantly reduce your front desk workload.

3. Goappstack – Automate your mobile customer acquisition

I met Goappstack’s founder Steve Espinosa at a San Francisco event recently, and his 30-second demo convinced me that there is a cheap & easy solution for SMBs to go mobile in under one minute.

Goappstack automatically syncs with your Google Places or Facebook profile (if you don’t have one of these, you need to read this article) and creates a mobile app with all your information preloaded. Your potential customers can then find you through mobile searches, browse your services or call to make an appointment.

According to Google’s Marissa Mayer, local searches constitute 40% of all mobile searches (Microsoft has said this number is 53%). With mobile device usage increasing rapidly, you don’t want to miss this opportunity to attract new customers.

4. Google Alerts – Automate reputation monitoring

Google Alerts is by far the easiest FREE solution to monitor your online reputation. All you need to do is type in your business name (if your business has a common name, I recommend adding your city) and  the email where you wish to receive alerts. Once your alert is created, you’ll be notified by email anytime your business is mentioned online, enabling you to respond quickly to customer questions and feedback wherever they may pop up.

5. Timely by Demandforce – Automate your social media posting

Timely is the flagship product of FlowTown, recently acquired by Demandforce. This tool allows you to schedule Facebook or Twitter posts in advance, allowing you to set it and forget it.

The icing on the cake is that Time.ly also schedules your posts to be published during the times people are most active on Facebook or Twitter. This helps you achieve greater impact with each post, and did I mention it’s all automatic?

Do you know more tools that will also help small businesses save time? If so, please share it with us by posting a comment below.