Felicia Savage is a content strategist and up-and-coming PR specialist living in Indianapolis. When she isn’t sharing online content, Felicia loves to draw and watch animated films in her spare time. Twitter: @canonicalkitteh
Launching a startup, believe it or not, is no easy task. Almost every day it seems like there’s a new story in the news about this startup success story or that one, a small band of entrepreneurial warriors who sailed to a new world of opportunity with little more than a really good idea. With so much romance surrounding these stories, it can be difficult to remember all of the sleepless nights that happened behind the scenes. The fact is, most startups don’t make it at all, and the ones that do put in endless work just to stay afloat.
That’s not to say, however, that a startup can’t make it through choppy seas. In fact, with each passing day, new tools are emerging designed specifically to help today’s entrepreneurs better handle the ins and outs of small business ownership. Startups looking to devote their full effort to making their product or service the best it can be should rejoice over some of these life preservers that can keep them floating just long enough to make it big:
Project and Customer Management
First things first: startups can’t go anywhere if they don’t have a solid plan for getting work done. It used to be that small business owners would toil over complex business plans and rely on hours’ worth of staff training to make sure that customers are being handled properly and everyone on the team is on the same page when it comes to project management. Luckily, thanks to powerhouses like Desk.com, Basecamp, and the ever-customizable Podio, entire business processes can be tracked and collaborated on with almost no external conversation necessary. That means less time wasted, more time working and happier customers.
Invoicing and Accounting
Depending on a startup’s needs and resources, hiring in-house accounting professionals might not make much sense. Even something as advanced as QuickBooks, while still relatively user-friendly, might be overkill. Startups in need of something a bit simpler can rely on “small business web” solutions like FreshBooks to invoice customers and track expenses. At the end of the fiscal year, FreshBooks will have kept sufficient records for any CPA to quickly put together a tax return, and the startup itself can rest easy knowing it has done its part to stay legal.
Data Recovery
With Cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive at the heart of most modern startup operations, there isn’t a huge concern over lost data on any given computer. That said, there are certain local applications – Outlook comes to mind – that rely pretty heavily on local storage. Making backups of all sensitive data is a must, and at times when even data that has been backed up becomes corrupted, data recovery software can turn a crisis into only a minor hiccup. Startups should do proper research into tools like advanced Outlook repair software to ensure that the life of no data is left to chance.
Payroll Mangement
Back to accounting–numbers can be the downfall of even the best startups around. It’s not often that a startup founder is also a CPA or a tax law expert, and it’s even rarer that early-stage companies can keep these professionals on the company payroll. So in addition to outsourcing bookkeeping with software like FreshBooks, many startups have learned to keep their heads above water by trusting external payroll companies with the sensitive issue of payroll tax law. Groups like Paycor or Paychex will calculate both employer and employee tax obligations, and they will also collect and pay those taxes on behalf of the company. Tax law is one of the scariest aspects of small business ownership, but often for less than $100 a month, these companies can usually make payroll a virtual nonissue for entrepreneurs.
As these tools continue to change and develop (and as new mobile tools increasingly give entrepreneurs access to their companies on the go), it will be exciting to see the changes in the startup world. Already, with the support of essential life preservers like these, people from all over the world are gaining the courage to open their sails and chase down the dream of small business ownership.