7 scalable software solutions for every small business
It’s the startup dream: Go freelance, register a Limited company from your spare room, end up with employees and an office before you know it.
It sounds like a fairy-tale to anyone thinking of taking the leap into business, but initial growth can soon spiral, quickly becoming too much for one person to handle. With the right product or service and a good business plan, moving from a single freelancer to a small business is well within reach.
Should you find yourself in this favourable position, you need to make the right decisions in the early days as these choices are key to success in years to come. Unfortunately, “50% of all small businesses fail in the first couple of years”, so it’s imperative you do what you can to support business growth now.
Whilst you’re exploring the market, revenue avenues and investment; using software automation will save you time and effort. But you also need to ensure you have scalable solutions in place. The options below will save time, streamline workloads and cut out a lot of administration and manual processes.
1. Google Drive
With one person, or a small team; local access to files and documents works fine — you can share via a network in the office or email. But when you add more employees and share the responsibility of work, remote access is important.
Google Drive allows you, your team and your clients to store, access and share files and folders wherever, whenever. Use with Google Docs to edit files quickly and easily, or upload Microsoft Office or Apple iWork files.
Google Drive data is stored in secure data centers and also offers two-step authentication to login to your account.
Cost: A free account provides 30GB of storage, or you can pay monthly for 100GB or 1TB.
2. Salesforce
The moment you start building customer data you need somewhere efficient and secure to store it. Your email contacts are not a scalable solution for prospect or customer data. Salesforce allows you to align your data with marketing, sales, customer service and business analysis.
Cost: Prices start from £20 per month.
3. Buffer
Social media marketing is a key element for reaching and engaging with customers, but it can be time consuming trying to stay on top of regular posting — especially if you’re trying to do it yourself at this stage. Buffer is a social media scheduling platform that lets you schedule posts across the majority of social media channels, and even suggests optimum times and provides analytics.
Cost: The free plan let’s you schedule 10 posts per social media account, or you can upgrade to add more posts, profiles and users.
4. Basecamp
If you’re working with clients it’s a good idea to get everything in one place from the offset. Basecamp is a project management tool that allows you to have discussions, create to-dos, send files, messages, schedules, and more.
Cost: Set up your first project for free!
5. Xero
If there’s something that’s going to keep you up at night it’s cash flow. Xero is cloud accounting software that lets you manage your finances on the go. It gives you a real-time view of your cash flow and offers online invoicing, reconciliation, payroll and more.
Cost: Prices start at £10 per month not including payroll.
6. Cezanne HR
As soon as you become an employer you need to consider HR processes and employee data. Using HR Software will save you time and holiday form induced headaches. It will also help you ensure you’re compliant and on top of key legal requirements.
Cezanne HR is a scalable solution that keeps all of your HR information in one place, with modules for absence management, performance management, time tracking, recruitment and training & development.
Cost: From £1 per employee per month, however there is a minimum fee.
7. Canva
Working alongside software that can aid marketing, HR, accounting, sales and project management — Canva opens the door to design. Quite simply it’s a web based design program for everyone. Use the drag and drop functionality to create professional designs and documents in no time at all.
Cost: Canva is free to use, but you do have the option of purchasing additional images or layouts from their library.