Small Business Software  – Must Have 9 Solutions for Building a Booming Startup

1. Accounting Software

You must have your finances in order, and accounting software for small business will automate financial management, minimize expenses, and report properly on your financial activities.

Small business accounting software is a rudimentary tool that enables managers to log money’s flow for internal and external review and auditing.

It’s the primary app for assessing the financial health of the business and for meeting legal compliance through such key financial components as accounts payable/receivable, general ledger, purchase order, billing, and inventory.

Other implementations of the platform expand to payroll modules, electronic payment, timesheet, and expenses, among others in order to gain a broader foothold in the market.

There’re several reasons that a small business should consider using this software, including:

Punctuality – The software is one way to get paid faster. It easily tracks accounts receivable and takes instant action when payment is past due.

Analytics and insights – App tracks all transactions, permitting detailed reports and insights on your business’s financial health.

This means you can easily make projections and real-time corporate decisions with just a few keystrokes. Creating these reports manually would be time-consuming. Automating these capabilities can help smaller firms compete with larger companies.

Simplification – It puts finance control in the hands of non-accounting experts, designed to give numbers a meaning while doing automated calculations.

With little training, you can complete all accounting processes and comply with legal standards from a desktop or a mobile device without paying an external party.

Cost savings – The platform automates calculations and administrative procedures and take control of your revenue framework so that you won’t have to outsource finance management to an external professional.

At the same time, they also reduce costs related to printing/distributing documentation and store essential data in secure/monitored locations.

Full financial transparency – From an accountant’s point of view, the highlight of a good accounting platform is the prevention of costly and recurring human errors.

Calculating inaccurate sums or failing to report data in time can quickly drive to a business crisis, and that’s where automating calculations are most beneficial.

2. Payroll Software

Managing accounts and maintaining correct records of all employees’ time and attendance to prepare payroll manually is a complicated and time-consuming operation. Payroll software for small business has made the tasks easier.

Today, most of the entrepreneurs prefer to use payroll platform for their small business to calculate employees’ salaries accurately and quickly.

The clarity and effectiveness of payroll systems provide significant advantages to organizations. These systems enable easy management of employees’ salaries, wages, taxes, and other deductions.

Main benefits of payroll software are stated below:

Saves times and avoids errors – Payroll operations are time-consuming and error-prone when manually done. A misplaced number or decimal point can devastate your finances.

You can turn to payroll automation to “skip” incorrect financial statements and penalties. It syncs and merges employee data, regulatory rules, and automates calculations, leaving no space for oversight.

Pays employees accurately – Paycheck mistakes not only waste your time; they cause distrust and can harm employee morale. Even when errors are accidental, they damage your reputation and, worse, can fuel demoralizing rumors.

The software keeps calculations consistent and accurate. It automatically factors in key aspects such as salary grade, benefits, expenses, allowances, and deductions when processing wages.

Pays taxes properly – If your employees and contractors are spread out across the USA or you run offshore teams, tax compliance will bog you down.

With almost 10,000 tax jurisdictions in America alone, withholding federal, state, and local payroll taxes comes in innumerable ways and forms.

Most payroll systems have built-in location-based tax calculations and reporting or capability to preset tax rules.It makes it easy to compute taxes owed and paid per employee, while templates accelerate submission of scheduled reports to regulatory agencies.

Fast access to employee data – The software centralizes employment data, such as contracts, CBAs, performance records, leaves, timesheets, and conversations.

Administrators can quickly access the related data from different platform or devices. In fact, keeping staff records in one place has other benefits beyond payroll, for example, job evaluation or open costing.

Customized reports – Whether payroll is attached to accounting or HR accounting, it can customize reports based on rows/columns, fields, and other rules.

You can determine what items go into a report, like payslips, benefits, expenses, or current/historical data. Generating recurring reports is standardized and scheduled with smart alerts.

3. CRM Software

CRM software for small business helps you build strong relationships with your customers, boost conversations, and increase revenue rates based on client data coming from multiple interaction channels.

It’s not only pure business but also induce strong personal bonding within folks. Development of this kind of bonding moves the company to new levels of success. Once this personal and emotional linkage is achieved, it’s effortless for any solopreneur to identify the actual needs of the customer and serve them in a better way.

It’s a belief that more the sophisticated strategies involved in implementing customer relationship management are, the stronger and fruitful is the business.

Here’s how CRM benefits can renew and expand your small business:

Streamlines customer profiling – Get a 360° visibility over your clients with details of their contact information, demographics, transaction history, and support interactions, among others. Organizing this customer data in a single, centralized location makes it easy to sort, store, and retrieve as required.

Improves sales opportunities – Having access to crucial information empowers your business strategies. It streamlines qualifying leads and converting prospects in buyers to ensure you’re spending time on valuable leads.

Improves your business strategies – The platform brings you deep insights about your customers and the market behavior by collecting disparate data together.

It looks through trends, patterns, and insights to improve your strategies. Plus, you get visibility on the sentiments of your customers towards your brand by translating the data streams coming from sources like sales data, support interactions, and social media content.

Forecast sales successfully – You can enhance your forecasting by an efficient and transparent sales pipeline. It’ll show you the deals and tasks that are incoming and going out. Know which of them are moving or inactive, so you can respond appropriately. It also helps you make changes to be sure your business goals are accomplished.

Align marketing/sales – These two operations work together to increase your overall customer experience. They both share info about customer insights, deals, and contacts.

4. Project Management Software

You may be taking in more specialized projects, and the right small business management software solution will help you in every phase during the project lifecycle.

Project management app is software used for project planning, change management, resource locations, and scheduling.

It enables PMs (project managers), stakeholders, and business owners to control costs and manage budgeting, quality management, documentation, and also may be employed as an administration system. The solution can also be used for communication collaboration between project stakeholders.

Here’re some of the critical features of a reliable project management platform you should keep in mind:

• Collaborate with employees in real-time– It offers communication tools to help teams discuss tasks in real-time. The system can keep each team member updated and allow them to deal with problems as they arise quickly;
• Document sharing– The software provides document sharing tools to enable PMs to edit or update project reports, and produce systems for communication/transparency;
• Manages project costs– The solution helps you to predict project costs;
• Identifies risks, budgets, and forecasting– The system determines project risks, track budgets, and make forecasts;
• Reporting features– The platform gives flexible report formats and assists you access the required data promptly and easily to keep projects on schedule;

5. Inventory Software

Small business inventory software is crafted to track product levels, sales, purchase orders, and incoming stock. It integrates with the accounting platform to create seamless workflows, and reports to show the health of your company.

It helps small businesses bring in the materials they need to produce a finished product for customers. The software uses bar codes or other identifier tracking systems to provide a full accounting of the shipping and storage aspects of the production operation.

To help you understand whether you could benefit from inventory management software, our IT experts summarized some of the advantages below.

Centralized storage – The more stock locations you have to manage, the more difficult it becomes to organize orders and send products to the right clients. With adequate inventory software in place, you’ll be able to track the availability of all services and products, and maintain that customers are promptly informed of their orders’ status.

Efficient stock processes – Proper inventory management is the cornerstone of any healthy retail organization since it saves the time and effort required to manage stock manually. Therefore, your staff will no longer write daily reports and run back-and-forth through them to give clients an answer, but rather have data ready and regularly updated on their devices.

Improved sales productivity – Many businesses report significant improvement of their closed deal rates upon incorporating their first inventory management software. Why? Because accurate inventory prevents you from losing clients and reduces common human mistakes like reporting products out of stock and referring customers to other stores.

In-time delivery – The main advantage of utilizing this software is being able to catch delivery deadlines and preventing users from waiting ages for their shipment to arrive. Advanced solutions will even involve them in operation, providing them a real picture of their order status, and enabling them to track the product’s journey from purchase to arrival.

6. Tax Software

You can save a lot of dollars if you identify your tax-time priorities in advance and use software that will address them for you.

Some solutions are pricier than others, but they’re still generally more affordable than hiring a professional – you don’t need to stuff all those tax documents into the briefcase and head off to your accountant’s office.

Tax software is designed to help individuals or businesses prepare for file income, corporate, and similar tax returns.

Small business tax software streamlines the operation of filing taxes by guiding the user through tax forms and also automatically calculates the company’s tax obligations.

Here’re some benefits:

• Calculates tax deductions– Tax authorities add new deductions every year. So, the updated software ensures you benefit from all these deductions and get a maximum refund;
• Files taxes from a PC – Tax software can e-file your taxes which is more convenient and quicker compared to snail-mailing system. Another merit is you can get faster refunds and don’t have to wait for a check;
• Avoids IRS audits – The software checks all errors before filing. It minimizes the chances of an IRS audit. If there is an error, leading software companies to promise to reimburse you for any penalties along with interest;
• Gets answers to your tax queries – The app gives answers to common tax queries. It shows typical questions and responses on the screen. The solution also provides useful tools. If you need more help, you can contact the vendor’s customer support team over email or phone;
• Stores tax details on your computer – If you utilize a retail software, it’ll store your tax information on your computer. And if you use an online cloud-hosted platform, you can access the info anytime, anywhere, for any year.

7. Bookkeeping Software

Anyone who isn’t aware of the importance of good bookkeeping software needs to understand that being flooded with paper isn’t the best way to run a startup.

One way of saving money for startups is to identify the right software that matches all the bookkeeping needs.

It includes recording and classifying all the financial transactions in your organization. It’s keeping track of what you spend and what your business receives.

These tasks used to be managed through books and ledgers, hence the term “bookkeeping.” Its transactions are recorded in daybooks, cashbooks, or journals and then directed to accounting software.

Here’s the list of reasons why you need a small business bookkeeping software:

• Separates business/personal finances – This separation isn’t only crucial to the growth and success of your business but also ensures that you’re not personally responsible for any debts or issues related to your organization;
• Prevents and identifies accounting/financial errors – By managing transactions and reconciliation, you can more easily determine a mistake that’s been made by your bank or by data entry—instead of finding these types of errors when they have already impacted your finances;
• Boosts productivity – It helps you put your business in the best situation to streamline the tax processes, receive the maximum deductions, and work successfully with any tax expert;
• Consistently maintains your financial data – The solution gives you a sense of your business’s progress and financial health—enabling you to discover strategies that improve your productivity or operations you want to change.

8. Invoicing Software

Every year, more and more solopreneurs are shifting to free invoicing software for small business thanks to their prices advantages over manual, paper-based billing.

Invoicing software is a system that automatically generates billing for rendered products and services. It creates a list of services and products along with their corresponding costs and transfers them to the clients as an invoice.

These invoices are commonly crafted using ready-made templates, mostly professional-looking ones, which makes the operation easier and advantageous to entrepreneurs.

Aside from efficiently managing all invoice-related project, the proper invoicing software should be able to extend the following pros:

• Minimizes late payments– It streamlines your billing and invoicing operation and enable you to get and receive payments on time. By keeping your data and schedules organized, you can have your collection on the nose and improve your profitability.
• Reduces missed payments– With consistently monitoring and tracking your billing commitments, you ensure that you don’t miss collecting any payments which will contribute to a positive bottom line.
• Maintains a professional image– The solution can boost your company reputation. Most software provide support for customized logos and other design upgrades to invoices and payment documents.
• Streamlines accounting and financial processes– You can minimize costs by reducing staff in the invoicing department and save time that’s spent on following up and going after the late payers. Also, you’ll increase cash flow with quicker payment of invoices and improve customer relations with shorter times in fixing and resolving errors.
• Minimize fraud and improve security– The software has levels of military-grade security features to ensure that the complete billing-to-payment operation is protected from prying eyes or hacks. It’s comparatively more secure than organizing invoices manually and transferring them as email attachments.

9. Collaboration Software

If you own a business or are an executive in an enterprise, you most likely heard about services called collaboration software.

It helps individuals work together on projects or joint tasks utilizing different tools. The solution often comes with messaging apps to speed up communication and permits users to share files, recordings, and videos, so that everyone stays on the same page.

Collaboration tools enable you to facilitate and improve on the following:

• Lower costs – The software makes it possible for employees to stay connected and join online conferences wherever they’re. Therefore, you don’t have to pay for travel expenses and telecommunications, and it keeps employees behind their desks instead of walking them around for brainstorming meetings;
• Employee satisfaction – It provides employees with access to valuable info, and most of all – a feeling that they’re valuable for your business and your mission;
• Less information disorder – Once shared on a collaboration app, conversation history is saved in an extensive database and secured with administered access;
• Access to knowledge – There’s no easier way to onboard a new employee than including him/her in a collaboration app where he/she can access documents and follow discussions. Experienced team members will also benefit from it, as they’ll be able to learn from each other.
• Improves staff performance – Perhaps the most significant attribute of workplace collaboration platform is the enhancements to staff productivity, which can increase by up to 25% when using one. Important documents and info are on-hand and can be retrieved at higher speed, minimizing the amount of time, which is spent on searching for files, which employees spend, on average two hours a day doing. Instead, staff can concentrate on work that’s the most valuable and profitable for the business.

Bottom Line

To summarize, small business software solutions help you save money and be efficient. You can use various tools to do tasks such as send more emails, manage customer leads, improves business productivity, get more online reviews, and so on.