Growing SMEs
Business management software for SMEs that outgrew the spreadsheet
Approvals, stock across sites, project margin and payroll on one ledger. Business management software for SMEs at the size where nobody holds the whole picture in their head any more.
- 15 to 60 people
- Departments and approvals
- Roles, not shared logins
At this size the business stops being one person's memory and starts being a system, whether or not anybody set out to build one.
Month end close
On trackDay 3
Is this the right page for you?
- Fifteen to sixty people, and roles have started to specialise.
- Somebody other than the owner now approves spending.
- You hold stock or work in progress in more than one place.
- A month-end close exists, and it takes longer than it should.
- A lender, a partner or a board is asking you for numbers.
- You are five people and everybody still does everything.
- You run the same operation from many separate outlets.
- You have several legal entities to consolidate.
What breaks between fifteen and sixty people
Every one of these is a symptom of the same thing: the founder's memory used to be the system of record, and it has stopped being able to hold it.
Month-end takes two weeks
Figures are chased out of a sales sheet, a stock sheet, a payroll sheet and a pile of receipts, then argued over by the people who produced them.
Every transaction posts as it happens with its document attached, so the close is a review of exceptions rather than a reconstruction of the month.
BookkeepingApprovals live in chat
A manager approves a purchase in a message thread. Three months later, when it matters, nobody can find it.
Approval rules by amount, category and person, with the decision attached to the transaction it authorised rather than sitting in a separate conversation.
Spend ControlsStock is right in one place and wrong in another
The warehouse count and the sales record disagree, and both are being used to make buying decisions this week.
One stock record, moved by the selling and the receiving. Movements between locations are logged as transfers rather than quietly adjusted away.
InventoryNobody owns the receivables
Customers on terms drift past due because chasing them is somebody's fourth priority on a busy week.
Ageing by customer, reminders on a schedule you set, and each invoice settling against its own account number so the balance closes itself.
InvoicingPayroll grows teeth
Deductions, pension, tax and people who joined mid-month. One error turns into forty separate conversations.
Payroll runs against staff records, calculates deductions, issues payslips and posts the entry. Mid-month joiners and leavers prorate themselves.
PayrollJob profitability is unknown
You know the business made money last quarter. You do not know which contracts made it and which ones quietly lost it.
Cost and revenue attach to the job as they occur, so margin is reported per project rather than only per company.
ProjectsEveryone shares one login
Access is all or nothing, so either people cannot do their jobs or everybody in the office can see payroll.
Roles decide what each person sees and can approve. Somebody who leaves is removed once, and the removal applies everywhere.
StaffsFive days instead of two weeks
Not because anybody works faster. Because the work that used to fill the fortnight was assembling data that now assembles itself.
The ledger is already closed to date
Nothing to gather. Sales, purchases, payroll and expenses posted themselves through the month, each carrying its document.
Exceptions, not everything
You review what did not match rather than re-entering what did. The list is short because the matching happened daily.
Stock reconciles
Counted against recorded, per location, with the variance traceable to a movement instead of being written off as shrinkage.
Margin by job
Contracts ranked by what they actually made after cost, so next quarter's pricing is an argument with evidence behind it.
Reports out
The pack goes to the board, the lender or the auditor. Nobody rebuilt anything in order to produce it.
₦0
setup fee, and no minimum contract, on any plan including Growth.
10 logins
on Growth, with roles, so a finance lead and an operations lead never share a password.
1 ledger
behind sales, stock, payroll, projects and spend. Close reviews it instead of assembling it.
What a growing SME switches on
Control first, because that is what loosened as you grew. Operations next, then the close, which gets easier as a consequence rather than as a project of its own.
Control and approve
Spending that now has to go through somebody else.
Run the operation
Stock, jobs, and the people doing the work.
Close the books
The month-end that used to eat a fortnight.
At sixty people the business is no longer run by whoever is in the room. It is run by whatever the records say.
Every growing company passes a point where the founder's memory stops being the system of record and becomes a liability instead. The transition is rarely planned. It shows up as a close that keeps slipping, an approval nobody can produce, and a stock figure two departments disagree about. The fix is not more discipline from people who are already working hard. It is a record that writes itself as the work happens.
Growth
Ten logins with roles, two hundred invoices a month, five hundred expenses and a hundred and fifty staff records. That is the shape of a fifteen to sixty person business.
Compare all plans- 10 team logins with roles
- 200 invoices a month
- 500 expenses a month
- 2,000 customer records
- 150 staff records
- Up to 10 stores
- 20 projects with task tracking
When you outgrow it: Usually logins or locations. Scale removes the caps, and is where multi-branch operations normally land.
Questions about business management software for SMEs
Mostly asked by the person who has just been made responsible for the close, and would like it to stop being a fortnight.
What is the best business management software for SMEs?
At fifteen to sixty people the deciding factor is no longer features, it is whether the tools share one record. An SME running separate systems for sales, stock, payroll and books spends its month-end reconciling them against each other, which is work that produces nothing. One ledger behind all four removes that work rather than speeding it up.
Do we need to replace everything at once?
No, and most SMEs should not. The usual order is spending and approvals first, because that is where control is weakest, then receivables, then stock, then the close. Each piece is useful on its own and gets more useful as the next one joins it.
How do approval workflows work?
You set rules by amount, category and person. A request that fits the rules goes through and is recorded with the rule that permitted it. A request that does not is routed to whoever is allowed to decide, and their decision is attached to the transaction rather than living in a chat thread.
Can we track profitability per project or contract?
Yes. Costs and revenue attach to the job as they occur, including staff time, materials and the expenses booked against it. Margin is reported per project, which is usually the number that changes how the next contract gets priced.
How long does month-end take once this is running?
That depends on how much of the month posted itself. Where sales, purchases, payroll and expenses all flow into the same ledger with documents attached, the close is a review of exceptions. The work that remains is judgement, which is the part that should take a person's attention.
Can different departments see different things?
Yes. Roles are set per person and control both what is visible and what can be approved. A stores manager can receive stock without seeing payroll, and a finance lead can approve payments without being able to change product costs.
What happens when we open a second location?
Stock, staff and sales are already recorded per location, so a second site is a setting rather than a migration. The multi-branch page covers what changes once you are comparing locations against each other.
Not quite the right size?
Businesses move along this scale, sometimes within a year. The page either side of this one may describe you better today.
The simpler way to scale your business!
Start free and see it working today, or talk to us about pricing for teams and higher volumes.