Bookkeeping comes first, because every other tool here ends up feeding it numbers. Pick the accounting software your accountant already works in, then add a support inbox once customer emails start getting lost in your personal mail. Onboarding can begin with a free form builder and a proposal tool. Recruiting software earns its price when you fill several roles a year; for a single hire, a job post and a spreadsheet will do.
Ask them before you pick. Xero is our overall pick and UK bookkeepers use it widely, so you share live books with them. QuickBooks suits a firm whose accountant prefers it, with payroll and time tracking as add-ons. If you trade in Spain, Holded prepares the official tax forms and handles e-invoicing in the same app.
Dubsado sends questionnaire, proposal, contract and invoice in sequence, then follows up on a schedule, from $35 a month. Agencies sending many quotes may prefer PandaDoc at $19 a month, since it shows you when a client opens the document. Tally costs nothing for the intake form and takes payments too.
Help Scout keeps support in a shared email inbox with a free plan, and its AI drafts replies from your own help articles. Crisp adds website chat and WhatsApp, and it charges per workspace, so a new hire costs no extra seat. A team juggling phone, chat and social with SLA targets will fit Zendesk.
Workable posts one job to many boards in a click and starts at $299 a month. Recruitee, priced by plan and company size, gives you a careers site and a pipeline where hiring managers comment on applicants. Teams already running HR in Personio can keep recruiting next to absences and employee records.
Load the manual into NotebookLM and new starters can ask it questions, with each answer pointing to its source passage. Quizgecko then builds a quiz from the same text to check what stuck. For your own reading, Glasp collects highlights from web pages and YouTube videos in one place.
Toggl Track starts a timer in one click and has a free plan, which suits a freelancer billing a few clients. Harvest turns tracked hours and expenses into an invoice without retyping. German teams that must record staff hours can use clockodo, free for solo users and from €4 per user a month.
Deputy and Planday build weekly rotas, let staff clock in and send hours to payroll, from $5 and £2.99 a month. Connecteam is free for up to 10 users who clock in from their phones with GPS. Restaurants that plan from forecast sales can look at 7shifts.
WordPress.com runs a WordPress site for you with no server work and a free plan to start. Cloudflare and Netlify host static sites for free on a global network. Hetzner rents servers in Germany and Finland from €5.49 a month if you can manage one yourself.
Accounting, since invoices and bank records need to be right from your first sale. In the UK, Xero and QuickBooks both cover invoicing, bank feeds and reconciliation, and most bookkeepers know at least one of them. A support tool comes next, once more than one person answers customers. Recruiting software can wait until you hire regularly.
A shared inbox covers most small teams. Help Scout has a free plan and keeps replies looking like ordinary email, with a knowledge base alongside. Intercom, from $29 a month, puts its AI agent Fin in front of your team to answer from your support content. Zendesk ($19 a month and up) pulls email, chat, phone and social into one queue with SLA tracking.
Tally's free plan includes unlimited forms and responses, conditional logic and payments, which covers an intake questionnaire. PandaDoc, from $19 a month, adds proposals and contracts that clients sign online. HoneyBook joins proposal, contract, booking and invoice in one flow from $35 a month, but it is built for US service businesses. Outside the US, a form plus a proposal tool gets you most of the way.
Usually not, because a job post and a tidy spreadsheet handle a couple of hires. Teamtailor pairs a branded careers site with an applicant tracker and GDPR tools, which helps once you hire several roles a year across the EU. Personio, built in Munich, adds employee records, absences and payroll data around recruiting. Ashby starts at $400 a month and suits companies that hire continuously and want funnel analytics.
NotebookLM answers questions about your own PDFs, websites and Google Docs and cites the passage behind each answer, so staff can query a process manual. Quizgecko turns notes or a web page into a quiz that checks what new hires took in. Tutor AI writes a course with lessons, worked examples and quizzes on any topic you type. NotebookLM has a free plan, which makes it the easy one to try first.
