Top 5 Business Apps to Help Build Your Startup

From design and payments to accounting, email marketing, and project management, these tools empower startups to streamline operations and maximise productivity right from the get-go.

Whether you're still in the early ideation stages or are well on the way to building your business, the new financial year marks an important opening chapter for many burgeoning startups. To give your idea the best chance of success, leveraging the right business technology from the beginning is key.

1. Design: Canva

Getting your branding and marketing looking professional right from the start, is a tall order if none of your team are experienced designers. Thankfully, Canva’s intuitive platform and vast library of pre-designed templates help you create professional-looking visuals even without advanced skills. You can choose from Canva’s bank of stock photos, icons, shapes, and illustrations or add in your own logos, colours or fonts to keep branding cohesive. What’s more, this cloud-based software makes it easy for your team to collaborate on projects by allowing members to share folders, add comments and markups to designs, and review and revert to previous iterations.

2. Financial services and payments: Zeller

With a growing base of Australian customers, Zeller is an all-in-one financial solution for any type of business. Having grown from the ground up, Zeller understands first-hand the financial requirements of early-stage startups. This non-bank alternative gets you up and running far quicker than a traditional bank, and offers free transaction accounts, debit and expense cards, online invoicing, and more.

The unique thing about Zeller’s accounts solution, in particular, is that you can sign up for a master account, and then create multiple free sub-accounts beneath that – enabling you to have independent accounts for team expenses, projects, paying offshore developers, or to store your seed fundraising. Best of all, it takes just minutes to sign up for a free account and doesn’t ask you for the usual requisite financial history that many traditional banks may ask you for which in an early-stage startup – may not be readily available! Zeller is the perfect option for new startups looking for a smarter, more flexible, non-bank alternative.

Plus, Zeller offers powerful, affordable payments solutions, so you can manage your business’ incomings and outgoings in one place.

3. Accounting: Xero

Australia's most recognised accounting software platform, Xero enables startups to manage their finances, track cash flow and expenses, and administer payroll at the point in time when your numbers grow beyond a founding team. In addition, Xero integrates with a long list of other apps and software including Zeller, so you can reconcile settlements from your Transaction Account or integrate Xero invoicing to accept online payments.

4. Email: Mailchimp

With affordable subscription plans and easy-to-build email templates, Mailchimp is a globally recognised email marketing platform with an enhanced number of CRM capabilities that are invaluable as your startup begins to connect with customers. With drag-and-drop templates, it’s also simple to use – even for a startup with limited access to designers and marketers. While Mailchimp is not something you may need on day one when you begin building your next idea — at the point in time when you are opening up to a waitlist or inviting new customers to register, it’s an ideal solution that will scale with you as your startup grows.

5. Project Management: Trello

When a startup founder first starts building their new idea, it’s likely they are wearing a lot of hats — technology, team, brand, design, product, financials, to name a few. A scalable, cloud-based project management tool like Trello is the perfect solution for early-stage startup teams to stay across different tasks, all in one place. With pre-built board templates — or the option just to start from scratch to build something that works for your startup — Trello’s boards, lists and cards will help you easily manage ideas, projects, and pipelines.

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