Technology is moving at the speed of light, and so are the finance tools that people build with it. There’s a seemingly endless amount of stellar digital products out there that make people more productive, better organised, and easier to reach — even if they’re on another continent.
As the CFO of your company, you know how important it is to stay ahead of the curve — the competition is heating up, and everything you can do to make your organisation better, faster and stronger can make a huge difference. Having the right finance tools at your disposal can significantly impact the way you work, saving you time and money.
But there are a lot of finance tools out there, in a lot of different subdomains — invoicing & payments, expense management, payroll, accounting, performance reporting, and more. The sheer amount can be daunting, and it can be hard to see which is the best for your situation. To get you started with finding the best products for your business, we’re rounding up the 6 best finance tools across subdomains we think you should know about.
Stripe
If your company is charging customers on a regular basis, you know how much of a hassle this can be. Accepting the right credit cards, dealing with invoicing and taxes — it’s a lot of work.
Stripe was created to make all of this a lot easier. One of the world’s leading payments tools, it has everything you’re looking for, including payment processing, billing, and advanced features like fraud protection and easy US incorporation — all wrapped up in a beautiful, simple design. There are a lot of options for developers, including deep integration with a large variety of systems, but it’s also easy to use if you’re not technically inclined.
+ Accept credit card payments, set up recurring billing, or build marketplace payments
+ Easy-to-understand design makes it accessible to anyone
+ Deep technical integration can help with creating a custom solution
– Pricing model favours larger businesses
Rydoo
There’s no CFO or finance team member out there who likes taking care of the company’s expenses. You need to deal with a bunch of paperwork, make sure you don’t lose any receipts and it often takes a long time before your employees are reimbursed.
Rydoo was created to make all of this a lot easier. A modern expense management platform, the finance tool has been designed to turn every part of the process into a better experience. With powerful features like a real-time expense approval system, OCR technology that automatically processes your receipts, and settings that allow complying with local tax regulations in most major countries, you’ll be breezing through your ever-growing stack of receipts in no time.
Even though there’s a lot you can do with Rydoo, there’s almost no learning curve thanks to the easy-to-understand interface — but even if you can’t figure something out, the support team is always ready to help.
+ Take the hassle out of expense management
+ Managers can quickly approve or deny reimbursement requests
+ Scan receipts from mobile devices with an easy-to-use app
– Some people might prefer keeping paper receipts instead of online receipt storage
Gusto
When you hire great people, it’s important to ensure that they’re paid on time, their insurance is taken care of and that everyone has easy access to their benefits. While the HR space is full of traditional, slow-moving companies, one of the new contenders in the space is doing things differently.
At its core, Gusto is a payroll service, but after having added features for team management, benefits and human resources over the last couple of years it’s grown into more of a people platform, offering new services like easy employee onboarding and benefits management.
With a strong focus on offering a great user experience, it’s filling a gap left by enterprise HR software, which can be confusing to use due to their convoluted interfaces.
+ Automatic payroll can make sure everyone receives their salary on time
+ Great benefits management makes your employees happy
+ Other features like employee onboarding make for a complete product suite
– Some features are focused on the US market only
Shareworks
More and more companies are offering employees stock in their business. It’s a great way to reward them for the hard work they put in, while also making them feel more connected to the performance of the company. But distributing shares and writing out equity documents can be a never-ending ordeal, especially when you have a big team.
Shareworks makes managing shares much more accessible. With its advanced finance tools, you can easily distribute electronic stock to your employees, making it immediately available to your employees through an online dashboard. This way, they can easily keep tabs on their amount of vested shares, check out the rules you’ve defined for their equity and much more.
+ End-to-end digital management of your equity program
+ Advanced features for both managers and equity holders
+ Works for any size of company, from start-up to IPO
– Not the most user-friendly interface
Domo
Data can be an incredibly valuable tool for any company — as long as you use it in a smart way. For most businesses, the problem isn’t that they don’t have any data, but that they don’t have a finance tool to make it useful.
Domo is a great way to bring together your data and turn it into thought-provoking visualisations, for example by creating an interactive chart that shows revenue or customer retention over time.
Being able to connect to various input sources, the finance tool can be used to see the larger picture — especially when the raw data doesn’t cut it. Because the interface has been designed for anyone, no matter their technical knowledge, getting started with your first visualisation is just a matter of dragging and dropping.
+ Make use of the financial data you already have
+ Interactive visuals make raw numbers easier to understand
+ Easy to use even without a technical background
– The number of possibilities can be overwhelming
1Password and 2FA
Virtually everything we use online is locked with a password, and this is for a reason — you don’t want others getting access to sensitive documents, payments accounts, or other critical finance tools. Unfortunately, most people aren’t in the habit of creating strong passwords — just take a look at the world’s most-used passwords, and then realise that once someone picks a password, they often stick with it for their different accounts.
So how do you make sure that the accounts your employees use are protected from potential attackers? Asking them to create harder-to-crack passwords might not be the answer, as they’ll probably end up in an easy-to-find Excel sheet on their desktop.
Using a password manager is a better solution. By creating a single complicated master password and only having to remember that one, 1Password then automatically creates highly secure passwords for all accounts. This way, you’ll never have to think about your passwords ever again.
Better yet, 1Password comes with built-in support for 2-factor authentication, which can make your accounts even more secure by combining the static password with a constantly changing one-time password. Even if an attacker figures out your password, they still need access to your OTP generator, and vice versa.
+ Easy and secure passwords protect important accounts
+ Teams feature makes sharing passwords easy
+ Offers a safe place to save critical documents
– Might take a while for everyone to use the product