Getting started on your first-ever business takes a lot of motivation, vision, and guts. Beyond these qualities, you also need to be efficient in accomplishing everyday tasks to get your business off the ground. An entrepreneur’s daily life can sometimes be chaotic. With the right solutions, however, it’s possible to make day-to-day tasks more manageable—even with bare-bones equipment and a small team.

But before you write down your equipment wish list, you need to make sure that the things you include in it are well-suited to help your business thrive. After all, you wouldn’t want to spend too much on unnecessary tech and leave fewer funds for other expenses such as labor and raw materials.

To help you identify the right tech for your business, here’s a quick rundown of what your starter toolkit should have and why these solutions are necessary for your growth in a digital-first landscape:

Laptop

If you’re going to start your business from scratch, you need a sturdy and reliable laptop to help you stay on top of daily tasks. These may include processing orders, contacting suppliers, updating your website, or coordinating with your team. Laptops are also more portable, so you can bring your work anywhere; this is important for the modern-day, on-the-go entrepreneur.

If you already have a laptop, it wouldn’t hurt to upgrade so you can do tasks more efficiently. Of course, you should expect to spend a hefty amount if you need top-of-the-line equipment for your business. You can always explore external funding sources, such as a reliable online loan Philippines-based lending companies offer to professionals in need. Thus, even though you’re working with a relatively low starting capital, you can still purchase a laptop with higher baseline specs. Look for things like long battery life, SSD storage, and at least 8GB of RAM.

Payment Processing Tools

If you’re running your business as a side hustle, free online payment services would usually suffice to cover basic payment functionalities. However, if you plan to expand your business and operate it in a physical location, you may need to add a good payment processing system to the mix.

This can be accomplished through a point of sale (POS) system that’s designed to support both digital and physical payments. Ideally, your POS should be able to accommodate a range of payment options including debit and credit card, e-wallets, and online payment gateways. With the digital realm being the new frontier for most—if not all— industries, you can stay competitive by implementing POS solutions designed for payment diversity.

Collaboration and Communication Solutions

Back in the day, businesses used to rely on lengthy email correspondences and phone calls to coordinate tasks and workload. Today, you can incorporate modern productivity tools to keep everyone in your team in the loop for all work matters. For convenience and efficiency, choose communication software or apps that allow simple installation, smooth navigation, and seamless interactions for various purposes. Some crucial features include file-sharing, remote meetings, and company-wide announcements.

Project Management Software

Going from task to task can be extra overwhelming for budding entrepreneurs. That’s why a lot of small business owners swear by project management tools to make every workday a lot easier to handle. Having a project management solution allows you to keep track of a schedule, be alerted on deadlines, and ensure that all project deliverables are accomplished. Indeed, nothing beats having heightened visibility over mission-critical tasks—whether it’s processing bulk orders, handling refunds, scheduling client meetings, drafting grant proposals, or responding to emails.

Resource-Planning or Inventory Management Solutions

If you’re a product-focused business, you also need inventory management tech to monitor your resources. Aside from helping you ensure that your stock is enough to meet customer demands, keeping track of your inventory also allows you to prevent unnecessary spending and loss of storage space due to overstocking.

Data Storage Tech

In addition to your material resources, you also need to prioritize the storage of data. This covers your business’s data as well as the personal information of your customers, including their addresses and payment information. Most businesses already employ cloud-based tools to store their records, which is helpful when managing a team that works remotely. For small business owners, cloud platforms are lifesavers that allow 24/7 collaboration from anywhere in the world. An ideal cloud-based storage solution should be secure, scalable, and easily navigable.

That said, it’s also vital to have data backup tools to ensure the availability of data even during emergencies like a data breach. Data recovery and restoration can be a pain, so it’s highly recommended that you have options for storage such as an external hard drive stored in a separate location.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System

Customer interactions are central to building your brand image. Generally, customer experience hinges upon your team’s capacity to accommodate client concerns and ensure that solutions are provided.

To boost customer experience, you can use a CRM solution to manage how your business communicates with customers or potential leads through various touchpoints. A cloud-based CRM system is highly recommended to help you analyze your lead-generation efforts and gain oversight on how customers are interacting with your business.

Accounting Software

Accounting and bookkeeping are both crucial aspects of any business. However, these tasks can turn out to be more difficult if you work by yourself or with only a small group. To properly manage the financial aspects of your business, you may need to use online accounting tools that can somehow simplify an accountant’s tasks. These include things like tracking expenses and income, generating invoices, and preparing tax returns. Overall, this kind of software is necessary to keep your business running smoothly and prevent revenue losses due to inaccurate reporting. 

Solidify Your Venture’s Growth with the Right Tech

With all this in mind, it’s important to note that these are only some of the business essentials that will make life as an entrepreneur less stressful. Other worthy additions to your toolkit include solutions for website creation and monitoring, email marketing, and cybersecurity (i.e., antivirus software).

Today’s entrepreneurs already have a wide range of tech to choose from, but what matters are the core tools that add the most value to your business. So, whether you sell flowers, bake pastries, or offer event-planning services, you deserve a starter kit that will only bring you more advantages as your business grows.