Start on the right foot with essential startup tools
One of the first steps you'll be looking at when creating your company will have to do with setting up the business admin side of things.
With a flurry of software products available, finding the best tools for startups can be challenging, specifically ones that would work for your business. If you’re a startup founder and your company has a partial or full presence online, this article should help.
As an online business ourselves serving other businesses, we’ve compiled a list of software tools our customers have adopted and cherished, as well as our personal favourites startup tools.
Why getting set up with startup tools so early in your business journey?
Simply because good software tools will save you time and money in the long run, even if they cost you money. Their sole purpose is to automate unnecessary manual tasks, speed up workflows seamlessly and clear your mental load so you can focus on the important parts of your business.
We’ve focussed on the following aspects:
- Accounting, human resources and payroll tools
- Communication and collaboration tools
- General business tools (sales, customer support, payments)
- Reporting and analytics tools
Categories:
1. Accounting, Human Resources and Payroll Tools For Startups
For accounting: Xero
Why?
You’ll need to do your company’s bookkeeping every year, as well as file your accounts for every tax year. You can do this yourself, or use the services of an accountant. Either way, we highly recommend you do so with the help of an accounting software.
Xero is a well-established accounting software with a global presence. The biggest advantage to this is that the software integrates with many other providers (including Onfolk for payroll). This is very beneficial, as bookkeeping will likely involve extracting data from multiple sources for the purpose of your yearly bookkeeping - the more integrations you can use, the less manual work you’ll need to do. Most accountants will be very familiar with Xero which will facilitate your bookkeeping process too.
Key features
- Track and pay bills
- VAT calculations and returns sent online securely to HMRC
- Claim expenses, track and manage your employee spend
- Connect your bank to Xero and set up bank feeds, so transactions flow straight into Xero.
Xero Pricing
Pricing for Xero starts at £5.60 per month. They also have an offer where you can get 60% off Xero's Starter plan for 6 months (link here).
For payroll and HR: Onfolk
Why?
Paying yourself and your team is one of the inevitable tasks you’ll need to get done every month as a business owner. This involves other tasks too: keeping your employee documents safely stored, keeping an employee log of their salaries, addresses etc, tracking time-off, and more.
Onfolk is a payroll company software that offers HR software with payroll integrated to it in order to minimise the amount of admin involved with paying your team and managing their data.
Think effective payroll automation, allowing to run payroll in the UK in a matter of minutes. It is also an official HMRC payroll software, meaning all HMRC reporting is done automatically for you every month. If you’re familiar with Gusto in the US, Onfolk is exactly that for the UK.
Key features:
- 90% automated payroll every month
- HRIS synced with payroll - specialised in small business payroll software
- Time off management and annual leave calculations included
- Automated onboarding and offboarding
- Pensions fully integrated with Nest, Smart Pensions and more
- Integrations with accounting softwares such as Xero and Quickbooks
- People insights, custom reports and org charts come built in
Pricing
£8 per employee per month:
- Pay monthly, cancel anytime
- Inclusive of all features
- No added fees
Further reading on HR and payroll software:
- How Much Does Payroll Software Cost vs Outsourcing Payroll?
- What to Look for in a Payroll Software for Small Business?
For your pension provider: Penfold
Why?
If you hire employees to work for your company and you’re UK-based, you must provide a company pension scheme and enrol all eligible employees when they join. This is called a pension auto-enrolment.
Penfold is a newer pension provider with a great focus on educating its users on how pensions work and why they matter. They’ve already won awards for their products and boast a 4.4 rating on Trustpilot. Users can expect clear, uncomplicated, and jargon free language throughout the platform, as well as an employee-facing app for easy access to their savings pot. Penfold are also one of the few pension providers to offer a Sharia pension plan.
Onfolk integrates with Penfold, as well as other pension providers.
Key features:
- Award-winning pension provider that demystifies pensions for employees
- Simple selection of diversified pension plans backed by BlackRock and HSBC funds that can match employee's goals and help grow wealth.
- 5-star rated pension app which provides employee with a clear view of how much they’ve got and how their saving is going
- Penfold provides comprehensive onboarding sessions, webinars where no amount of questions are too many.
Pricing
Penfold is completely free for employers. Employees on the scheme are deducted one simple fee:
- Lifetime, Standard and Sustainable plans: Charge 0.75% for savings up to £100k, and 0.4% on any amount over £100k.
- Sharia plan: Charges 0.88% for savings up to £100k, and 0.53% on any amount over £100k.
Further reading: 6 Best Payroll Software and HR Tools for Startups in 2023
2. Communication and Collaboration Tools For Startups
For general organisation and collaboration: Google Workspace
Why?
Because emails, written comms outside your company, meetings and document sharing are part and parcel of business today.
All Google Workspace plans provide a custom email for your business and include collaboration tools like Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites and more. We can really recommend Gmail, Calendar, Meet and Sheets as products. That being said, for the price of one product, you get an awful lot for your money which makes it a very attractive bundle to get early for your business.
Key features
- Custom and secure business email
- 100-participant video meetings
- 30 GB pooled storage per user for all your emails, document storage and files
- Security and management controls
- Standard support from Google
Pricing
£5 per user/month with a minimum one-year commitment.
For async team comms: Slack
Why?
If your team’s working pattern is hybrid (office and remote) or fully remote, you’ll need a way to communicate effectively together.
Slack is another favourite in the tech industry for async communication. Within Slack, you can message anyone inside or outside your organisation and collaborate just as you would in person. People can work in dedicated spaces called channels, which bring the right people and information together.
Key features
- Chat securely with open or private communication: Message and communicate in public channels, private channels, direct messages
- Slack integrates with many tools, making it easy to collaborate and share work across your team
- Connect with other workspaces that also use Slack and communicate effectively with them through the platform
- App available for communications on the go
- Keep a history of all communications (the length will depend on your subscription)
Pricing
Slack starts free which is great for founders just starting out - the main drawback of the free version is that chat history is capped at 90 days. Premium subscription, which gives you access to your chats’ full history, starts at £5.75 per month per user.
For documentation and team collaboration: Notion
Why?
You’ll need a centralised place to store all your documents, working sheets, contracts for your company. Making sure this space is organised and secure will save you time - no rummaging through your emails, for eg.
Used and loved by many startups and tech scaleups, it’s hard not to mention Notion as an indispensable software tool for small companies in 2023. Notion is a documentation and team collaboration tool that is incredibly versatile in its uses and scales easily with your company. You can use one of their many templates to set and track hiring processes, organise team retros, document your people policies, and so much more.
Key features
- Create your own company Wiki by centralising all internal knowledge in Notion
- Very easy to use, beautiful and clean design
- All company documents are stored in one place, and can be searched or commented it easily
- Many, many templates for different teams: product, design, ops, recruitment, engineering
Pricing
Starts at $8 per user / month, billed annually.
However they also do offer a discount for startups, where startups can apply to get up to 6 months free.
3. General Business Tools For Startups
For customer support: Helpscout
Why?
If the company you’re building involves talking to customers and solving customer queries, we’d recommend funnelling these conversations into a specific tools to stay organised in your day-to-day.
Helpscout helps you manage all your customer conversations in one powerful platform that feels just like your inbox. Their platform is intuitive and simple to set up and manage - they
Key features
- Live chat can be set up on your website in minutes so you can start talking to customers in real time
- Proactively send messages in-app or on your website to offer support, share helpful links, or make timely announcements.
- Their product includes the ability to build a knowledge base for your business, which can reduce your support volume
- Their out-of-the-box reporting tool allows you to track customers happiness, team efficiency, and other key metrics
Pricing
Their standard subscription tier starts at $20 per user per month. This will provide you with a great start, including
- 2 Inboxes (email + live chat)
- Docs knowledge base
- In-app messaging & surveys
- Access to al their integrations.
For your sales CRM: Close
Why?
Just as for customer support, if your business involves a lot of sales outreach we’d recommend managing your sales pipeline in a dedicated tool. The benefits are numerous: a sales CRM tool will come with a design that will facilitate your sales work and automate admin tasks which will save you time in the longer run. And hopefully help you make more money!
Close is a lead management tool developed for small- and medium-sized businesses. It automates sales processes by capturing, nurturing, and converting leads into buyers. The tool that helps you track of sales deals and clients over the span of multiple months while simultaneously unifying our team's communication.
Key features
- Store Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities into sales pipelines
- Create multiple Opportunity Pipelines to help track different teams, products, or sales processes
- Sync your work email and calendar to keep all your sales communications in one place. Plus, centralise context for your team, syncing communications on each Lead’s timeline.
- Set Tasks for yourself and other team members within leads
- Task management and notifications, and meeting reminders you can set up
- Import and export tool for contacts outside the tool
Pricing
Close’s Startup tier starts at $49 per user per month, billed annually. With this tier, you’ll be able to store Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities, create up to 3 Sequences, sync your email inbox and calendar to the platform, and benefit from their Zapier integration.
They offer a 14-day trial too.
For payments: Stripe
Why?
If you’re charging customers online for your product, you’ll need a payment processor to accept payments, send payouts, and manage your businesses online.
Stripe does exactly that by offering an integrated suite of payments products. From e-commerce stores to subscription businesses, to platforms and marketplaces, they offer a complete stack for all your payments. It’s also worth noting Stripe as a global outreach, with 135+ currencies and dozens of payment methods. This should make it easy to launch new markets and add your customers’ preferred way of paying to increase conversion abroad.
Key features
- Payments for any business: Stripe offer a complete stack for all your payments needs across channels
- Super easy set up: Create an account online in minutes and use our libraries and SDKs to securely accept payments
- Scale payments easily with 135+ currencies and dozens of payment methods available
- Design your own payments form on your site using Stripe Elements
- Create customisable invoices to accept recurring or one-off payments
- Accept payments in your iOS or Android app using our mobile SDKs
- Stripe also includes a flurry of features protecting you and your revenue against fraud, and to maximise your payments’ acceptance rates.
Pricing
Stripe’s pricing is on a per payment basis. There are no setup fees, monthly fees or hidden fees aside from that. For standard UK cards, the fee is 1.5% + 20p per payment.
4. Analytics and Reporting Tools For Startups
Google Analytics
Why?
If you have a business that lives partly or fully online, you’ll need to dig into its performance regularly to understand how you can improve it and attract more customers.
We should start by saying that Google Analytics is completely free. That’s right. Now, the product is also really good - they enable you to get a holistic understanding of your customers across devices and platforms. Google Analytics gives you the tools to understand how people use your sites and apps, so that you can take action to improve their experience.
Key features
- Understand how your customers interact across your sites and apps, throughout their entire lifecycle
- Uncover new insights and anticipate future customer actions with Google’s machine learning to get more value out of your data
- Take action to optimise marketing performance with integrations across Google’s advertising and publisher tools.
Pricing
Free!
Start on the right foot with essential startup tools
One of the first steps you'll be looking at when creating your company will have to do with setting up the business admin side of things.
With a flurry of software products available, finding the best tools for startups can be challenging, specifically ones that would work for your business. If you’re a startup founder and your company has a partial or full presence online, this article should help.
As an online business ourselves serving other businesses, we’ve compiled a list of software tools our customers have adopted and cherished, as well as our personal favourites startup tools.
Why getting set up with startup tools so early in your business journey?
Simply because good software tools will save you time and money in the long run, even if they cost you money. Their sole purpose is to automate unnecessary manual tasks, speed up workflows seamlessly and clear your mental load so you can focus on the important parts of your business.
We’ve focussed on the following aspects:
- Accounting, human resources and payroll tools
- Communication and collaboration tools
- General business tools (sales, customer support, payments)
- Reporting and analytics tools
Categories:
1. Accounting, Human Resources and Payroll Tools For Startups
For accounting: Xero
Why?
You’ll need to do your company’s bookkeeping every year, as well as file your accounts for every tax year. You can do this yourself, or use the services of an accountant. Either way, we highly recommend you do so with the help of an accounting software.
Xero is a well-established accounting software with a global presence. The biggest advantage to this is that the software integrates with many other providers (including Onfolk for payroll). This is very beneficial, as bookkeeping will likely involve extracting data from multiple sources for the purpose of your yearly bookkeeping - the more integrations you can use, the less manual work you’ll need to do. Most accountants will be very familiar with Xero which will facilitate your bookkeeping process too.
Key features
- Track and pay bills
- VAT calculations and returns sent online securely to HMRC
- Claim expenses, track and manage your employee spend
- Connect your bank to Xero and set up bank feeds, so transactions flow straight into Xero.
Xero Pricing
Pricing for Xero starts at £5.60 per month. They also have an offer where you can get 60% off Xero's Starter plan for 6 months (link here).
For payroll and HR: Onfolk
Why?
Paying yourself and your team is one of the inevitable tasks you’ll need to get done every month as a business owner. This involves other tasks too: keeping your employee documents safely stored, keeping an employee log of their salaries, addresses etc, tracking time-off, and more.
Onfolk is a payroll company software that offers HR software with payroll integrated to it in order to minimise the amount of admin involved with paying your team and managing their data.
Think effective payroll automation, allowing to run payroll in the UK in a matter of minutes. It is also an official HMRC payroll software, meaning all HMRC reporting is done automatically for you every month. If you’re familiar with Gusto in the US, Onfolk is exactly that for the UK.
Key features:
- 90% automated payroll every month
- HRIS synced with payroll - specialised in small business payroll software
- Time off management and annual leave calculations included
- Automated onboarding and offboarding
- Pensions fully integrated with Nest, Smart Pensions and more
- Integrations with accounting softwares such as Xero and Quickbooks
- People insights, custom reports and org charts come built in
Pricing
£8 per employee per month:
- Pay monthly, cancel anytime
- Inclusive of all features
- No added fees
Further reading on HR and payroll software:
- How Much Does Payroll Software Cost vs Outsourcing Payroll?
- What to Look for in a Payroll Software for Small Business?
For your pension provider: Penfold
Why?
If you hire employees to work for your company and you’re UK-based, you must provide a company pension scheme and enrol all eligible employees when they join. This is called a pension auto-enrolment.
Penfold is a newer pension provider with a great focus on educating its users on how pensions work and why they matter. They’ve already won awards for their products and boast a 4.4 rating on Trustpilot. Users can expect clear, uncomplicated, and jargon free language throughout the platform, as well as an employee-facing app for easy access to their savings pot. Penfold are also one of the few pension providers to offer a Sharia pension plan.
Onfolk integrates with Penfold, as well as other pension providers.
Key features:
- Award-winning pension provider that demystifies pensions for employees
- Simple selection of diversified pension plans backed by BlackRock and HSBC funds that can match employee's goals and help grow wealth.
- 5-star rated pension app which provides employee with a clear view of how much they’ve got and how their saving is going
- Penfold provides comprehensive onboarding sessions, webinars where no amount of questions are too many.
Pricing
Penfold is completely free for employers. Employees on the scheme are deducted one simple fee:
- Lifetime, Standard and Sustainable plans: Charge 0.75% for savings up to £100k, and 0.4% on any amount over £100k.
- Sharia plan: Charges 0.88% for savings up to £100k, and 0.53% on any amount over £100k.
Further reading: 6 Best Payroll Software and HR Tools for Startups in 2023
2. Communication and Collaboration Tools For Startups
For general organisation and collaboration: Google Workspace
Why?
Because emails, written comms outside your company, meetings and document sharing are part and parcel of business today.
All Google Workspace plans provide a custom email for your business and include collaboration tools like Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites and more. We can really recommend Gmail, Calendar, Meet and Sheets as products. That being said, for the price of one product, you get an awful lot for your money which makes it a very attractive bundle to get early for your business.
Key features
- Custom and secure business email
- 100-participant video meetings
- 30 GB pooled storage per user for all your emails, document storage and files
- Security and management controls
- Standard support from Google
Pricing
£5 per user/month with a minimum one-year commitment.
For async team comms: Slack
Why?
If your team’s working pattern is hybrid (office and remote) or fully remote, you’ll need a way to communicate effectively together.
Slack is another favourite in the tech industry for async communication. Within Slack, you can message anyone inside or outside your organisation and collaborate just as you would in person. People can work in dedicated spaces called channels, which bring the right people and information together.
Key features
- Chat securely with open or private communication: Message and communicate in public channels, private channels, direct messages
- Slack integrates with many tools, making it easy to collaborate and share work across your team
- Connect with other workspaces that also use Slack and communicate effectively with them through the platform
- App available for communications on the go
- Keep a history of all communications (the length will depend on your subscription)
Pricing
Slack starts free which is great for founders just starting out - the main drawback of the free version is that chat history is capped at 90 days. Premium subscription, which gives you access to your chats’ full history, starts at £5.75 per month per user.
For documentation and team collaboration: Notion
Why?
You’ll need a centralised place to store all your documents, working sheets, contracts for your company. Making sure this space is organised and secure will save you time - no rummaging through your emails, for eg.
Used and loved by many startups and tech scaleups, it’s hard not to mention Notion as an indispensable software tool for small companies in 2023. Notion is a documentation and team collaboration tool that is incredibly versatile in its uses and scales easily with your company. You can use one of their many templates to set and track hiring processes, organise team retros, document your people policies, and so much more.
Key features
- Create your own company Wiki by centralising all internal knowledge in Notion
- Very easy to use, beautiful and clean design
- All company documents are stored in one place, and can be searched or commented it easily
- Many, many templates for different teams: product, design, ops, recruitment, engineering
Pricing
Starts at $8 per user / month, billed annually.
However they also do offer a discount for startups, where startups can apply to get up to 6 months free.
3. General Business Tools For Startups
For customer support: Helpscout
Why?
If the company you’re building involves talking to customers and solving customer queries, we’d recommend funnelling these conversations into a specific tools to stay organised in your day-to-day.
Helpscout helps you manage all your customer conversations in one powerful platform that feels just like your inbox. Their platform is intuitive and simple to set up and manage - they
Key features
- Live chat can be set up on your website in minutes so you can start talking to customers in real time
- Proactively send messages in-app or on your website to offer support, share helpful links, or make timely announcements.
- Their product includes the ability to build a knowledge base for your business, which can reduce your support volume
- Their out-of-the-box reporting tool allows you to track customers happiness, team efficiency, and other key metrics
Pricing
Their standard subscription tier starts at $20 per user per month. This will provide you with a great start, including
- 2 Inboxes (email + live chat)
- Docs knowledge base
- In-app messaging & surveys
- Access to al their integrations.
For your sales CRM: Close
Why?
Just as for customer support, if your business involves a lot of sales outreach we’d recommend managing your sales pipeline in a dedicated tool. The benefits are numerous: a sales CRM tool will come with a design that will facilitate your sales work and automate admin tasks which will save you time in the longer run. And hopefully help you make more money!
Close is a lead management tool developed for small- and medium-sized businesses. It automates sales processes by capturing, nurturing, and converting leads into buyers. The tool that helps you track of sales deals and clients over the span of multiple months while simultaneously unifying our team's communication.
Key features
- Store Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities into sales pipelines
- Create multiple Opportunity Pipelines to help track different teams, products, or sales processes
- Sync your work email and calendar to keep all your sales communications in one place. Plus, centralise context for your team, syncing communications on each Lead’s timeline.
- Set Tasks for yourself and other team members within leads
- Task management and notifications, and meeting reminders you can set up
- Import and export tool for contacts outside the tool
Pricing
Close’s Startup tier starts at $49 per user per month, billed annually. With this tier, you’ll be able to store Leads, Contacts, and Opportunities, create up to 3 Sequences, sync your email inbox and calendar to the platform, and benefit from their Zapier integration.
They offer a 14-day trial too.
For payments: Stripe
Why?
If you’re charging customers online for your product, you’ll need a payment processor to accept payments, send payouts, and manage your businesses online.
Stripe does exactly that by offering an integrated suite of payments products. From e-commerce stores to subscription businesses, to platforms and marketplaces, they offer a complete stack for all your payments. It’s also worth noting Stripe as a global outreach, with 135+ currencies and dozens of payment methods. This should make it easy to launch new markets and add your customers’ preferred way of paying to increase conversion abroad.
Key features
- Payments for any business: Stripe offer a complete stack for all your payments needs across channels
- Super easy set up: Create an account online in minutes and use our libraries and SDKs to securely accept payments
- Scale payments easily with 135+ currencies and dozens of payment methods available
- Design your own payments form on your site using Stripe Elements
- Create customisable invoices to accept recurring or one-off payments
- Accept payments in your iOS or Android app using our mobile SDKs
- Stripe also includes a flurry of features protecting you and your revenue against fraud, and to maximise your payments’ acceptance rates.
Pricing
Stripe’s pricing is on a per payment basis. There are no setup fees, monthly fees or hidden fees aside from that. For standard UK cards, the fee is 1.5% + 20p per payment.
4. Analytics and Reporting Tools For Startups
Google Analytics
Why?
If you have a business that lives partly or fully online, you’ll need to dig into its performance regularly to understand how you can improve it and attract more customers.
We should start by saying that Google Analytics is completely free. That’s right. Now, the product is also really good - they enable you to get a holistic understanding of your customers across devices and platforms. Google Analytics gives you the tools to understand how people use your sites and apps, so that you can take action to improve their experience.
Key features
- Understand how your customers interact across your sites and apps, throughout their entire lifecycle
- Uncover new insights and anticipate future customer actions with Google’s machine learning to get more value out of your data
- Take action to optimise marketing performance with integrations across Google’s advertising and publisher tools.
Pricing
Free!
