Remote working was already gaining popularity among startups, even before the COVID-19 pandemic made it a necessity. Often the best minds spread across countries or continents have to come together to execute brilliant ideas. Working from home or working remotely has been made a ton easier as SaaS tools have gained prominence. These tools are often scalable and adapt to the size of your business, and reduce a lot of manual work. This leaves you with ample time to concentrate on more important problem-solving. Using tools is time-saving, less prone to error, and offers excellent overall efficiency.
We’re at that stage in the tech industry that you can find a tool to cover all aspects of your startup. In this article, we will look at the top SaaS tools that help remote SaaS startups with collaboration, communication, accounting, sales, project management, etc.
Collaboration and Communication:
One of the most fundamental things that remote startups have to take care of is to ensure efficient internal communication. Internal communication involves communication between individuals, teams, and company-wide communication.
1. Slack
Slack is our number one recommendation for internal collaboration and communication, especially for small teams. It’s a one-stop-shop for individuals as well as teams and people working on the same project.
Features:
- Offers the option to create custom channels for specific teams or projects.
- Searchable history
- Voice and video calls, along with the option to have group huddles
- Offers more than 2,200 integrations
- Allows the option to connect with other teams and companies via SlackConnect
2. Microsoft Teams
While Slack is great for small teams, we recommend using Microsoft Teams for larger teams. If you already use other Microsoft tools for your startup then you’ll find integrating Teams in your workplace very seamless.
Features:
- Edit and share documents in real-time
- Arrange and conduct online meetings
- Instant messaging and video calling with multiple participants (up to 10,000 people)
- Integration with other Microsoft products, and several other third-party applications
- Offers data encryption while transferring and storing
Accounting
As a remote startup, you’ll be doing a lot of financial transactions within and outside of your company. It is important that you set up a clear, transparent, and error-free system of accounting.
3. AlignBooks
AlignBooks helps you manage transactions for your company from anywhere in the world. It’s a GST Billing solution that also helps with creating and analyzing error-free quick financial reports.
Features:
- Offers GST compliance by creating e-way bills and GST invoices
- Helps sales management with features such as customizable billing templates, pending bills reminders, and MIS reports
- Lets you record, summarize and classify financial transactions
- Offers three advanced pricing plans along with a free plan
- Offers integration with RazorPay
- Helps purchase management with features like automated import purchases, TDS, Workflow for service orders and purchases, etc.
- Offers the option to generate location-specific reports
Human Resources
Regardless of whether you have a dedicated HR team or now, HR work is crucial to managing a startup remotely. SaaS tools help you with efficient employee management.
4. FactoHR
A payroll and HR software, FactoHR offers a centralized, secure, and efficient platform to store and manage employee data. The tool also helps you follow payroll and management policies.
Features:
- Time and attendance management
- Payroll Management
- Keep track of individual employee goals and performance
- Employee onboarding with letters for joining, confirmation, appraisals, etc.
- Employee work-related expense management
- Also comes as a mobile app that employees can use to mark attendance, solve queries, etc.
- Lets you manage benefit schemes (gratuity plans, provident funds, etc)
Sales
As a remote SaaS startup, you are definitely selling a product. This means you need a system of managing and keeping track of Sales and business growth.
5. Pipedrive
PipeDrive is a great tool that lets you deep-dive into the details of your sales performance and helps you grow your business.
Features:
- Lead tracking via web forms
- Lets you track emails, calls, contact history, etc to check metrics on sales
- Helps you automate a lot of manual work, saving you tonnes of precious time
- Offers a mobile app that allows the option to save call logging details.
- It also lets you keep track of schedules and activities even when offline
- Allows note-taking and lets you know which of your clients are nearby
6. Salesmate
Salemate is one of the most widely trusted and used sales tools, especially for remote startups.
Features:
- Bulk texts and emails
- Calling options along with power dialler
- Templates for emails and texts
- Lets you track sales activity
- A built-in intelligence service that provides reports on sales metrics
- Offers integration with more than 700 business apps
- Mobile sales CRM that is compatible with email, the G Suite, iOS, and Android
Project Management
In a startup, different teams work on different projects at the same time. Sometimes, the same team could be working on more than one project simultaneously. This makes project management important and also tricky, especially for remote teams. Thankfully, SaaS tools can help you reduce confusion and optimize productivity.
7. Trello
A collaboration tool best suited for project management, Trello helps you organize your work in a way that optimizes efficiency and seamless communication.
Features:
- Task management is made easy with unlimited cards.
- Create, track, share, and manage checklists to keep track of tasks with due dates.
- Option to add custom fields like dropdown menus, dates, checkboxes, etc.
- Helps you automate repetitive work which saves you a lot of time
- Offers a free plan with limited features, and a paid plan for all features
- Keeps data secure with 2-factor authentication
- Offers a number of customizable templates for project management
- Offers integration with a number of third-party applications like Outlook, Gmail, Slack, Salesforce, Dropbox, etc.
- Lets you keep track of team activities with unlimited activity logs
Cloud Storage
Storing data manually or on offline databases is an outdated practice, and especially redundant for remote teams. Storing and managing data on cloud-based services is easy, efficient, reliable, and offers easier access and control. Cloud-based databases are also easier to scale as your business grows.
8. AWS cloud storage
A cloud computing platform, AWS lets you analyze, control, access, and store data on their cloud seamlessly.
Features:
- Offers object storage, that includes data related to mobile apps, websites, enterprise apps, etc.
- Store and share documents and files
- Offers block storage when many operations are taking place and the workload is heavier.
- Data transfer is made easy. AWS lets you sync, transfer, process, and collect data.
- A hybrid cloud that lets you connect on-site applications to the cloud.
- Move data storage and computing near the source of data. Works smoothly even with bad internet connectivity
- Lets you automate and manage data backup, and offers compliance offering as well as simplified data protection.
Customer Support
When you sell products, customer trust and loyalty are of absolute value to you. Customer support helps you build those values, as well as make sure that customers are able to enjoy your product in the right way. Having the right channel of communication with customers, as well as the right system to respond to queries and feedback is a must for all startups.
9. Zendesk
Dominating the market for more than a decade, Zendesk is one of the leading tools for customer support. Using Zendesk will simplify customer support not only for you but also for your customers.
Features:
- Functions across platforms and messaging services. Also syncs information in a single thread if the same customer reaches out from multiple channels (Twitter, email, etc)
- Compiles tonnes of data on our customers, via a number of sources to give you a 360-degree picture of the customer with the New Sunshine CRM platform.
Marketing & Social Media
Another important aspect of running a startup is managing marketing and social media for your company and products. Continuous and efficient communication and collaboration between content, design, marketing, etc are the core of managing Social media and other forms of marketing.
10. Agorapulse
Great for managing day-to-day social media tasks, ads, performance, etc, Agorapulse is our top choice tool for marketing and social media for remote startups.
Features:
- Offers team collaboration features that let you notify the specific team member who is responsible for responding to comments or messages, along with other actions like- assigning content, assigning drafts for approval, reports on the workload, and response time for different team members, etc.
- Monitor Facebooks ads
- Offers a chrome extension that lets you share content from anywhere. It also lets you customize posts as per the requirements of different social media platforms. (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
That’s a wrap on our roundup of the 10 Best tools you need to excel as a remote SaaS startup. While different Startups have different ways and systems of organizing and management, these tools help you save time and optimize productivity. We hope this was helpful, if there are any awesome tools you use for your remote startup that we have missed, let us know in the comments below!
