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Ask HN – How do I find a back office provider for my startup?

1 points by nickfrost ↗ HN
Quora? Ask other founders? Google? It's a painstaking process that takes a while. How can it be made simpler to find the back office (accounting, HR, payroll, etc) provider that fits my startup? Thanks!

1 comment

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leegreenwood
Having done this many times over the last few years, as either technical co-founder or technical director, I've often wondered whether a list of useful sites/tools would be worth putting together.

You mentioned a particular need for financial backoffice software... After a long and painful investigation, I settled on Xero (http://www.xero.com), and I've never looked back.

Here is a brief list of other services I rely on absolutely:

Google Apps - Office platform (6 companies using) AWS - Cloud infrastructure (5 companies using) Mailchimp & Mandrill - Email delivery (5 companies using) Zapier - Automation (5 companies using) Buffer - Social Media automation (5 companies using) Github - Source control (5 companies using) Braintree - Subscription payments (4 companies using) Stripe - Credit card payments (4 companies using) Geckoboard - Status monitoring (3 companies using)

This is not intended to decry any providers I haven't mentioned, this is just a list of my go-to companies/services that I use to get new companies running fast.