7 Best Automation Tools for Startups

Automation is updating the way businesses manage their processes. It helps them simplify the tedious processes and scale up their business growth in ways that are unimaginable. While some businesses implement these tools to improve their employee engagement, others use them to revamp their business processes or to improve overall business efficiency.

Due to the limited workforce strength, startups and small businesses can actually adapt to newer technologies in a better way compared to medium or large-scale enterprises and make a business more valuable. But the dilemma here is to choose the best among the ones available in the market. Thus in this article, we have enumerated some prominent business automation tools for startups.

Best Automation Tools to Improve and Sustain Startup Growth

1. TalentRecruit – For Recruitment & Onboarding

TalentRecruit is an enterprise-ready complete recruiting platform that best suits all types of business sizes. But as it is affordable, startups can leverage it. It is a powerful, extensive, and configurable recruitment platform that uses AI and ML to improve and simplify your traditional hiring practices. These ML capabilities also help in bifurcating, ranking, and auto-suggesting top talents according to the requirements.

The platform offers features that allow hiring managers to connect with candidates during any stage of the hiring process, thus improving talent management and engagement from the beginning. Not only hiring, but it also offers an intuitive onboarding platform to make employees’ first day pleasant and engaging.

Salient features

• Virtual Recruiter Erika helps recommend the best-matched candidates among the shortlisted ones and improves candidate engagement by resolving their queries on the spot.
• You can easily set up examinations for candidates, manage interview schedules as per the availability of candidates, HR, and interviewers, and assess interview performance using the multi-level evaluation platform.
• Automate your candidate offer management by simplifying offer approval, creating varied templates, and tracking offer acceptance.
• Its New Hire portal allows new hires to understand company culture, sign digital documents, attend training, and much more to ensure a smooth, delightful, and paperless process.
• The complete hiring solution can be seamlessly integrated with HRMS, job portals, social platforms, email or SMS services, evaluation platforms, etc.

2. factoTime – For Attendance Tracking

Monitoring the presence of your workforce is extremely essential, especially during remote working. factoTime is a mainstream time tracking solution that automates attendance management and is built for small-scale businesses and startup companies like yours.

Whether it is office premises or any remote location such as sales, client meetings, etc., employees can mark their attendance directly using punch with selfie and location feature from their mobile devices. This helps HR or managers to have greater visibility of remote employee attendance and get rid of the old biometric systems. In addition, employees can also view their attendance and total working hours details.

Salient features

• Admin can easily add, delete, or correct attendance in case of any missed punch from their mobile device.
• In the case of travel expense management, you can store advances taken by employees and monitor total expense details.
• Define employees’ varied pay rates and process basic payroll calculations quickly based on the work hours captured.
• Their QR code attendance feature is very beneficial and secure as the admin has to scan the unique QR codes generated in employees’ mobile devices rather than vice versa. This eliminates buddy punching.
• You can also schedule shifts, create holiday and work calendars, and generate ready-to-download attendance reports in custom formats.
• It comes with a web portal and mobile app for both android and iOS platforms.

3. ClickUp – For Project Management

ClickUp is a comprehensive tool that helps organizations, teams, and individuals to organize tasks and reduce work silos. Using this all-in-one platform, you can track employees’ work, chat with team members, and set goals.

Furthermore, any of your teams or departments can leverage ClickUp to manage their unique tasks flexibly. You also get an intuitive mobile app to manage global tasks on the go.

Salient features

• Divide any type of project into subtasks and customize them using 35+ ClickApps.
• Leverage 4 types of customizable views: list view, kanban view, box view, and calendar view to get better visibility over all your tasks at once.
• Develop custom documents and link them to tasks and workflows so your team can work together in real time.
• Team members can map their ideas and collaborate using virtual whiteboards.
• Build customized and flexible dashboards using 50+ widgets to get insights about all the activities and reduce bottlenecks in the process.
• Chat with your teammates, assign tasks, and share files.

4. Xero – For Accounting Management

Xero is a well-known and highly regarded cloud-based accounting platform for small businesses, bookkeepers, and accountants. It also comes with an advanced mobile application where you can track your business finances at your fingerprints.

It is a complete expense tracking solution that helps businesses connect with their banks, payment services, accounting systems, etc., to keep everything secure.

Salient features

• You can directly pull finance and expense records from scanners, bank portals, invoicing applications, etc.
• You can bifurcate certain expenses and suggest changes to facilitate bank reconciliation.
• Financial reporting for audit purposes can be simplified as you can generate balance sheets and other essential statements with a single click.
• Get all the important statistics related to expenses or billing in a single place using the business dashboard option.
• It can be integrated with multiple third-party apps to boost business processes.

5. Bitrix24 – For CRM

Bitrix24 offers one single system to manage every aspect related to sales and client support. It is a CRM platform that helps in acquiring and managing leads, improving client service, and closing contracts.

There is no per-user pricing which makes it a budget-friendly CRM for businesses. Its prominent features include features like client database, pipeline management, omnichannel marketing, sales analytics, etc.

Salient features

• Whether your sales executive works remotely or at the office, you can track their tasks and projects, schedule video conferences, and track their productivity effortlessly.
• You can attract leads via web templates, calls, social media, messages, or forms and manage all prospects, leads, and client deals using the drag-and-drop feature in a single place.
• You can handle marketing campaigns, targeted ads, etc., to attract prospects.
• You can simplify workflows and sales funnels with the help of various automation features.
• This system also streamlines inventory management, wherein you can control your warehouses and stocks.
• You can enhance customer communication, integrate social media, provide support through live chat, and connect through VoIP telephones.

6. Skype – For Employee Communication

Skype is the world’s leading communication tool to help establish a better and free communication channel for employee interaction. It is an easy-to-use texting, group calling, and individual calling platform that can be used even for interacting with clients.

It can be used for high-quality video conferencing, clear voice calling, messaging, and sharing data. With the help of VoIP telephony, managers can communicate with their team members and discuss project tasks even during remote work.

Salient features

• You can record calls to focus on ongoing meetings rather than taking notes, which can be performed afterward.
• All your contacts that use Skype will be listed in a single place.
• Connecting and reaching people who don’t use Skype is extremely easy and affordable using Skype’s local number.
• Leverage real-time translation and live subtitles to understand any video or voice conversation and stay ahead in your tasks.
• It comes with standard end-to-end encryption, so your conversation remains private.

7. Buffer – For Social Media Management

Buffer is an intuitive and user-friendly social media management system that is used by many brands, individuals, freelancers, businesses, etc. You can schedule posts or stories for any time and date, engage with the audience, and reply to important comments.

It is freely available to manage up to 3 channels and is best for small businesses who want to get started. You can control various channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, and Start Pages for your brand.

Salient features

• Based on audience activity, it determines the ideal publishing time and posting type.
• Evaluate the performance of your social media and get meaningful insights.
• Create your “link in bio” and gather all of your best content in one place to boost interaction.
• Personalize reports by adding your logo and brand name.
• Concentrate on critical comments and interact with your audience.

Concluding Notes

You can actually improve employee productivity and business progress by harnessing technology. But in case you are wondering which tools to choose, you can understand your workforce challenges and needs. Also, as a startup, put your budget forward while procuring any digital system. All these tools mentioned above have costs worth the features they provide, so you can avail free trials or software demos to understand them in-depth.