Cloud Construct Ltd
Business & Technology Centre, SB220
Telford Innovation Campus
Priorslee
Telford
Shropshire
TF2 9NT
Registered in England & Wales
№ 8133882 | VAT № 139470595
Established 2012
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Give your new business the best start in life with online tools that will help it be efficient from day one…
When you are starting a new business, sorting out your IT needs can be confusing and expensive. In the “old days”, you would visit your local computer sales shop and buy some packages off the shelf in the hope they would do what you wanted, often resulting in a square peg round hole situation.
With the advent of internet-based ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS), the choice of highly tuned business tools has increased hugely.
There are many advantages to using these software models, including:
- They are relatively low cost, with monthly payments that are cashflow friendly. Often there are free trial periods to take advantage of
- Setting up the software is straight forward, with no complicated installations
- It will work on any device, so there is no need for expensive PCs or servers
- There are a wide range of providers, so you can choose a solution to best match your needs
Important considerations when choosing a SaaS
- The size of your team, as that will impact the overall cost
- Estimate how the business will grow to be sure you can sustain the cost of scaling up, and that the software will still be suitable as you grow
- Check that your data is exportable if you wanted to migrate away from the software
- What kind of support is offered and how responsive is it?
- Will it share data with other systems to allow you to integrate processes?
- Can your internet connection support it?
Beware of SaaS solutions that offer cheap start-up costs but can quickly become more expensive as you increase in staff numbers or require extra features.
Ideally you should choose software that will work for your business in the long term. Switching between systems can be expensive in terms of both time and staff training, and there is the potential of losing historical data should you cancel your subscription.
Our SaaS recommendations
We would like to share what Cloud Construct believes to be the best and most trusted SaaS products available. Our priorities are to have flexibility to work from anywhere, whilst always being able to access our data and work as if we were at our office desk, unrestricted by any single computer or device.
Here are some of the packages that we have successfully used within our own businesses.
Email and Office applications (word processor, spreadsheets, file storage)
We have been using Google’s platform for email, office documents and file sharing since we started the business. It is very reliable, does everything we need and is continually being improved. We liked it so much, we became resellers of the product, allowing us to better service our customers that use it.
Accounting
We use FreeAgent here at Cloud Construct. It came with our business banking and had the edge on Xero at the time. It is really easy to use and makes reporting PAYE and VAT to HMRC a breeze.
We would say that Xero has done a better job of offering more features since then, which has now nudged it ahead. If things such as multicurrency support are a requirement for you, then check Xero out.
Cloud Construct has written bespoke applications to read data to and from both FreeAgent and Xero, to accomplish tasks such as invoice creation and financial reporting combined with data from other systems.
Phone System
Many people go down the default route of calling BT for a phone line and shelling out thousands for a “business” phone system with long lock-in periods.
As long as you have a fast and stable internet connection, you could opt for a more affordable and fully featured Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system.
Calls are much cheaper with this SaaS set up and you are able to work from anywhere by running phone software on your mobile or laptop. It’s not for every business, but works for a small team of occasional phone users, and allows you to transfer calls, leave voice messages and put people on hold. We have found it a huge cost saver.
Sales / CRM
Get your sales processes started with HubSpot for free. They offer lots of add-ons and features to expand this product and increase the effectiveness of your sales pipeline. Their marketing tools are great for tracking and targeting potential leads across search and social networks.
Task Recording
This allows us to effectively manage our tasks and accurately record the time we spend on projects. This tool has been paramount to our business success.
We’ve written software tools to be able to automatically create invoices within the FreeAgent accounts software, which has rapidly decreased the time we spend on billing activities.
Project Management
Apollo contains some project management features but we needed a platform to log conversations around our projects, and help track what we are working on.
Trello is a great organisational tool, and helps us to collaborate on complex tasks with our team internally, and also with our clients. It allows us to track change requests, prioritise tasks and feedback on progress.
File and Data Storage
Our files are securely stored on Google Drive where we can access them from any device or computer, from wherever we’re working. We can easily share them with each other without clogging up the hard drives of our computers with duplicate files.
This isn’t suitable for everybody. For instance, if your internet connection is slow or unreliable, or maybe if you’re handling very large files. For this we have Synology Network Attached Storage (NAS).
NAS is a small but powerful server that contains one or more hard drives. We always advocate running at least two drives, one being a mirror copy of the other in case of failure. These devices run on your internal business network, but can also be reached from home if needs be. Additionally, you could link multiple boxes in different locations together, to synchronise data ensuring there is an offsite backup in case of a disaster.
Team Communications
Keeping in touch with your team is essential for collaboration. Aside from telephones and email, we use instant messaging tools for group chats and virtual meetings.
Slack does a great job of allowing us to message and share files, whilst keeping the discussion topics separate across projects. For our clients, who also use Slack, we have shared communication channels to quickly and easily get in touch with each other.
A nice additional feature is that Slack integrates with many other platforms, such as Google Drive and Trello, helping to tie up discussions around our documents and projects.
Customer Support
If your business deals with customers, then it is essential to have a communication tool that makes sure you don’t drop the ball when it comes to looking after them. Help Scout is a customer service system that ensures you deal effectively with support requests; to make sure nothing gets missed or forgotten.
How we can help
There are thousands of other tools out there, with new ones coming out all of the time. We’ve only spent a small amount of time here describing the highlights of each one, but there are so many additional benefits to all of them.
If you would like any help setting up your new business, or advice on how to integrate such tools into your business workflows, please call us on 01952 898626. We would love to help you put the tools in place to make your new business efficient from day one.
If you cannot find the right software for a particular need, we can look at building bespoke software that will work for your business – improving workflows and efficiency, and overall making your business more profitable.
LET’S TALK ABOUT IMPROVING YOUR BUSINESS
