What is the best technology stack in a modern growth focused business?

Finding technology and software that can improve your business is becoming an increasingly important for savvy growth oriented business owners.

Here at IP Tax Solutions, we are constantly looking for tech improvements that we can make to our processes and to help us serve our clients better.

So here's our current tech stack for you to explore and to see whether it provides any sparks of inspiration for your business (we will revisit regularly as I suspect it will change rapidly):

Cloud Accounting - Xero

Our accounting platform of choice.

Relatively slick and easy for most business owners to use and follow. You can do all of your invoicing and bills through it. It includes payroll.

Decent reporting and, most importantly, a thriving ecosystem of integrations and other apps that have been developed around it.

Bookkeeping: Hubdoc or ReceiptBank

Don't be piling receipts and bills into a shoe-box or envelope!

Get them snapped or scanned and uploaded into a platform like Hubdoc or RB. These apps can extract the data from your bills and post directly into Xero.

Productivity: Google Suite / Slack

Gmail is tough to beat for email.

Google Docs (MS Word) and Google Sheets (MS Excel) are as good as Microsoft's offerings now. The ability to work collaboratively is unsurpassed in my view.

Slack has also been an awesome tool to collaborate in shared workspaces with clients.

Communication: Google Meet or Zoom

With COVID-19 restrictions, we've been holding near constant Zoom calls - 'Zoom Fatigue' is soon to enter the Dictionary!

Although Zoom is solid, I've been liking Google Meet as Google seem to have rushed to up their game in recent months (much improved on Hangouts).

Being as it comes included in Google Suite, Meet has become my recent 'go-to'.

Visual Communication: Cloud App

Useful for quick screenshots to communicate visually.

Document storage: Tresorit

Been using Tresorit for the past 3-4 months and it seems to be a solid and secure encrypted platform that appears to tick all the boxes in this age of strict GDPR.

Calendar appointments: Book Like a Boss / Savvy Cal

I've been using BLAB for a number of years and it works well (very much like Calendly) in allowing you to share your calendar slots for someone to book.

Currently, trialling Savvy Cal as it allows users to overlay their own calendar which looks like a smart move.

Project Management: Teamwork / Asana

Currently trialling Teamwork after having used lots of different platforms. Liked Trello in the past but not quite enough features (e.g. capacity planning etc) to work for us.

Asana has been good, but we're currently trialling Teamwork - suspect it will be a fight-out between these two... (will update).

CRM: Capsule

Apart from being an awesome platform, they've also been an awesome client, so they're the obvious choice

Dubb is a similar app to Bonjouro and BombBomb but with some added functionality.

Loom is a great go-to for quick instructional videos or to convey a message visually (e.g. highlighting text or numbers on screen) in place of an email that might take a 1,000+ words.

Vimeo Pro for video hosting. Also use YouTube for instructional videos where you want some Google search reach.

Calls: CircleLoop

Great interface. Reasonable pricing. It just works.

(Oh and founded by some guys who've also been awesome clients so what's not to like...?)

Integrations / Automation: Zapier

What's not to like about Zapier?! An awesome tool for automating mundane and repeated tasks. I just love this app and use it (a lot).

Knowledge Base: Obsidian / Notejoy

Obsidian is hard to describe but awesomely powerful for connecting ideas - if you've tried Roam Research, you'll get it.

Notejoy is very much like Evernote. I like its interface and simplicity.

So there's a round-up of our current favoured tech-stack. I've no doubt missed a few and will probably have exchanged a handful by the end of the month (!) but hopefully this gives you some food for thought...