Start Smart, Scale Fast: The Tech Stack Every Startup Needs to Thrive

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Almost no one works as hard and as fast as a startup founder. The second place in that honour goes to the core teams of these startups. Being pioneers, these teams are often writing the book on what needs to happen in a business like theirs. There is no roadmap for what they do - no best practices, no best workflows, no easy ways to economise and optimise. They're figuring it out as they go along.

Now, let's add the compounding effects of high stakes and a lack of resources (mostly, money!), and what you have is a very high stress work environment. Add to this a deplorable tech stack: teams spend too much time doing busy work, too much time finding workarounds, too many spreadsheets, too many shared files, and too much clutter.

Fortunately, there's no need for this much frustration. The beauty of being alive in the SaaS era is that if you have a problem, someone out there is designing a solution for it. For founders, automating and streamlining processes and workloads is an investment not just in their businesses, but in themselves. By doing so, they eliminate busy work, and are better able to focus on the tasks that only they can do. This is how one moves the needle.

IDFC FIRST Bank's First Wings Programme aims at helping early, growth and mature stage startups find their feet, rapidly. Among their many startup focused offerings, IDFC FIRST Bank's Beyond Banking offerings include 100+ beyond banking partnerships that cover the entire spectrum of business functions: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) & Accounting to Field Sales Management to Taxation to Human Resources Management System (HRMS) and Payroll.

After all, when you're growing at the pace of a startup, you need all the support you can get.

Eight Areas You Should Consider Automating

ERP and Accounting

Managing finances is crucial but also incredibly time-consuming, especially when you don't have a background in accounting. It can also be incredibly daunting to outsource your accounting to a third party, and, on the other hand, very expensive to have your own accounting team. ERP systems integrate accounting, invoicing, inventory, and reporting to automate workflows and provide real-time data. This frees founders from manual bookkeeping, in addition to creating accounting data that adheres to the standards external accountants need it to be. Moreover, as this data flows from integrated workflows, the chances of entries being missed are near zero.

HRMS & Payroll

Managing HR tasks like hiring, onboarding, payroll and benefits administration is a full-time job in itself. However, most founders lack expertise in employment law and HR best practices. An HRMS automates routine tasks, ensures compliance with regulations, and streamlines processes end-to-end. This not only saves them significant time, but also reduces risks from errors and even lawsuits down the line.

Taxation

Tax laws, tax structures and tax rates change (ever so slightly) every year and deciphering how this impacts your business is a challenge that even professionals struggle with. However, this is an area that demands attention as non-compliance can result in hefty penalties. An integrated tax automation solution calculates and files sales, income and other business taxes accurately based on accounting entries. This takes the guesswork out of taxes and gives founders peace of mind, rather than spending nights poring over tax documents.

Logistics

Fulfilling orders and managing inventory across multiple sales channels can be a logistical nightmare without the right tools. By syncing orders and inventory with warehouses and carriers, logistics solutions provide a single source of truth for order status and fulfilment. This improves customer service, optimises shipping costs and frees up founders to focus on product innovation instead of operations headaches.

Travel

Business travel booking and expense management is tedious if done manually via emails and spreadsheets. A travel and expense tool centralises bookings, approvals, and reimbursements to simplify travel planning and make expense reporting a breeze. This frees up founders' time for meetings and deals instead of admin tasks.

E-commerce

Building and maintaining an online store requires technical skills most founding teams lack. E-commerce platforms allow easy store creation, inventory management, and order processing without coding. This lowers the barrier to launching online sales and scaling, allowing core teams to focus on marketing, product development and customer support. Today, several e-commerce platforms are ready for deployment out of the box, greatly accelerating the time to market.

Communication

Keeping internal and external communication organised across email threads, documents, chat apps and video calls can create headaches for all involved. Unified communication and collaboration platforms integrate all these channels into a single view. Without unification, it is very easy to lose track of certain threads of conversation, face version control issues, and collaborate in ways that just aren't efficient. Unification, on the other hand, provides transparency and accessibility and streamlines workflows for distributed teams. It also allows remote and hybrid teams to work as efficiently as if they were in the same office, giving your teams much greater resilience.

Productivity

Juggling multiple to-do lists, documents and deadlines across different apps leads to disorganisation and wasted time hunting for information. Productivity suites offer a centralised workspace to consolidate tasks, notes, files and automated workflows. This not only brings clarity and structure to the core team's work, it also allows them to work smarter by focusing on strategic planning, product development and high-impact initiatives rather than administrative tasks. The ability to automate routine workflows means founders get to spend more time on work that moves the business forward!

Finding Your Tribe

Every startup is unique, and nothing is ever a one-size-fits-all solution. Often, the best way to identify what works for your startup is to talk to your cohort of other startup founders. People who are in the same or similar line of business, or present in the same markets will often have great insight on what works and what doesn't. If you don't have a cohort yet, then you're in luck.

Moneycontrol, CNBC-TV18 and IDFC FIRST Bank have come together in the Leap to Unicorn initiative, which provides startups an opportunity to network, get mentoring and raise funds. In its first season, Leap to Unicorn saw a fantastic turnout of over 5500 registrations, around 600 of which went through a 4-week interactive virtual bootcamp. Through multiple rounds of shortlisting, the top 6 start-ups received a funding intent of around Rs. 60cr* from investors LetsVenture, 3one4 Capital, Venture Catalyst, GetVantage & Peercheque.

And now, it's time for Season 2. If you're a startup based anywhere in India, and you have a prototype or Minimum Viable Product ready, this could be your opportunity to find the right partners, investors and mentors. Are you ready to Leap to Unicorn? Apply Now: https://bit.ly/LTUSeason2

Moneycontrol journalists were not involved in the creation of the article.