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Ask HN: What suite of management tools runs your small business' finances?

6 points by austinjp ↗ HN
Those of us who run small businesses, what combination of affordable tools handle your finances -- accounting, invoicing, reconciliation, and other related functions?

How did you move from checking bank-statements against a spreadsheet of invoices every month, to that sweet solution you're using? What software stack integrates best, and gives you performance, reliability, and confidence in the company? QuickBooks + iZettle + Zoho? ClearBooks + Stripe + Salesflare? Or have you gone all-in with a single provider for everything?

If your business is based on per-appointment fees (e.g. lawyer, courier, hairdresser) how do you reconcile appointments with fees/invoices, and coordinate appointments with client details from your CRM system?

Keen to hear from very small UK-based businesses under 10 employees in particular, but all experiences will be interesting to read.

8 comments

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cjbenedikt
Quick book! It connects between my bank a/c, accountant and myself
austinjp
Thanks for the data point. I'm curious about how "integrated" your setup is. Do you use it for invoicing as well as receiving payments? Do you need to do any reconciliation of income, invoices, fees received, outstanding payments, etc? Is it plugging in to any APIs of other products?
cjbenedikt
To reconcile between accountant and bank a/c and outstanding payments in terms of taxes. Invoicing is still separate. It can probably plug into other APIs. What would really be of help is some kind of factoring service. Late payment of invoices is a real issue in general for SBs - creates massive cash flow problems at times. Something like that in the US would be a hit: https://arex.io/
bsn54
I have seen a company with $30 million turnover(wholesale distribution) being run with all data in just 10 to 15 excel books within a folder.

The fascinating aspect is that it was being maintained by the owner himself who also happened to be a CA...

austinjp
Yeah, I'm keen to avoid that :)

While it no doubt works, it wouldn't integrate robustly with other systems. I guess the integration factor is what interests me. I'm unlikely to be able to afford an all-singing all-dancing monolithic solution, so I'd prefer plug-and-play components.

skiltz
Xero
austinjp
Thanks, do you integrate it with any other systems?
jetti
I use Wave, but it is only myself. I like it because it has the small bank that I use for my business account and it is free (I have ~$130 in my business bank account so free helps a lot) but has upgrades. You can do basic accounting as well as invoicing from it for free and you can get more advanced features for the subscription