Tools to Enhance Efficiency for a Home-Based Startup

More people than ever are building businesses from their homes, and startups certainly need to operate efficiently if they are to succeed in the long term.

To that end, here are a handful of tools that can boost the efficiency of any fledgling firm which is getting off the ground in a home working environment.

Eventually, you are going to need a place to keep your mission-critical business documents, and relying on local hardware to do this is a bad idea because if something goes wrong, you could lose all of your precious data.

Thankfully the cost of cloud storage has come down dramatically, and there is a multitude of competing platforms available, from Google Drive to Dropbox and beyond.

Making the leap to the cloud for storage is also a good idea because it makes it easier to share data with others, streamlining communication and collaboration as your startup grows.

In terms of actually managing files within your business, it is definitely efficient to organize information in documents of the same type. It is easy to convert PDF to Word, or vice versa, for just this purpose.

If you are in charge of a small but ambitious team, you will definitely need to be on the ball in terms of managing the projects for which you are responsible. This is all the more important if everyone works remotely because there is less face-to-face contact time than there might otherwise be, so using a project management platform is worthwhile.

Again, there is plenty of competition in this marketplace, with solutions like BaseCamp and Monday aiming to let you track progress, assign tasks and create to-do-lists so that you can keep projects ticking over and ensure that you hit deadlines to impress clients. Here is some information about Basecamp pricing to help you decide

Startups can struggle when it comes to balancing the books and making sure they fulfill their financial obligations to employees as well as to the taxman, so harnessing accounting software tools to take the hassle out of this process is definitely worth it.

Platforms like Quickbooks are good for managing the payroll, reporting for tax, keeping tabs on expenses, and much more besides. You can take charge of all of this yourself if you wish, or collaborate with a qualified accountant using this kind of software to make your life easier.

Efficient communication has never been more important, especially with working from home, meaning that the likelihood of meeting people in the flesh is lower.

There is a world of choices here as well, although it is generally best to rely on platforms for internal and external communications that are tried, tested, and widely adopted.

For video calling and conferencing, Skype and Zoom remain to contenders, while instant messaging services like Slack can be good for handling in-house chatting between remote colleagues.

Most importantly, make sure you test out and compare different digital tools to determine which will deliver the biggest benefits to your home-based startup.