Let's start with a confession. In early 2024 I spent a week writing down everything I did at work, in fifteen minute blocks, because I had a feeling my days were disappearing and I could not say where. The notebook is still in my desk drawer. It makes for grim reading. Roughly 45 hours a week, out of maybe 55, were going on things like retyping form entries into a spreadsheet, emailing people to ask if they had signed a contract yet, and answering the same four customer questions on repeat.
None of that was the business. It was the admin around the business. So I decided to fix it, and the way I did it was slow and a bit unglamorous. One tool at a time. Try it for a month. Keep it if it saves real hours, cancel it if it did not. Plenty got cancelled. These are the ten that stayed, and I have been using most of them for over a year now, long enough to know what is annoying about each one.
Here they are in a table first, because I know some people just want the list.
| Tool | The job it took off my plate | Setup time |
| Zapier | Copying the same data into three different apps | One afternoon |
| HubSpot CRM | A lead spreadsheet nobody kept up to date | Most of a week |
| QuickBooks Online | Invoices in Word, receipts in a shoebox | A day |
| Calendly | Emailing back and forth to find a meeting time | 15 minutes |
| DocuSign | Print, sign, scan, chase | An hour |
| Gusto | Payroll in a spreadsheet | Half a day |
| Expensify | Paper receipts taped to claim forms | A couple of hours |
| Buffer | Remembering to post on social media | An hour |
| Freshdesk | A shared support inbox with no owner | A day |
| Notion | Explaining the same process to every new hire | Never really finished |
And here is what actually happened to my week once they were all in place. I kept tracking on and off, which is where the numbers in the graph below come from. They are my numbers, from one small business, so take them as a rough guide rather than a promise.
This is the one I recommend to everyone, and also the one that is hardest to explain to someone who has not used it. The short version is that Zapier lets apps that have nothing to do with each other pass information along. You tell it 'when this happens over here, do that over there', and it does.
The first thing I built with it was for our website enquiry form. Before, every new enquiry meant someone opening the spreadsheet, typing the details in, then opening the CRM and typing them again, then posting in the team chat so sales knew. Three places. It was tedious enough that on busy days it just did not happen, and a lead would sit unnoticed until Friday. The image below is what replaced all of that.
That last point is the thing to know about Zapier. It is quiet when it works and also quiet when it breaks. I have a reminder on Fridays to open the task history and scan for red. Takes two minutes. The other catch is pricing. The free tier feels generous until you have five or six automations running, and then you hit the limit surprisingly quickly. We pay for it now and I do not begrudge a penny, but go in knowing that.
For a long time our 'CRM' was a Google Sheet with a column called Last Contacted. You can probably guess how well that column was maintained. It was fine when we had ten or fifteen live conversations. Once it crept past thirty, people started falling through the gaps. The one that finally pushed me to change was a prospect who had asked for a quote, received it, and then heard nothing from us for six weeks because the follow up date was in someone's head and that someone was on holiday.
HubSpot's free CRM fixed that in the plainest way possible. You connect your inbox, and from then on every email to or from a contact gets logged against them automatically. When you finish a call you set a follow up date, and on that date the task appears in your queue. You cannot forget because the software does not let you.
I open the pipeline board every morning with my coffee. Each deal is a card, each column is a stage, and I drag cards along as things move. It takes ten seconds to see where everything stands, which is ten seconds more insight than the spreadsheet ever gave me.
I should be honest about the upselling. HubSpot wants you on a paid plan and it tells you so constantly, with locked features and banners and emails. The jump in price from free to paid is steep. We have stayed on the free plan for eighteen months and it does everything we need. You just learn to tune out the prompts.
I put this off for over a year because accounting software felt like something you got when you were a proper company with a finance person. Meanwhile I was making invoices in Word, tracking who had paid in a spreadsheet, and turning up at my accountant's office every quarter with a literal shoebox. Quarter end took me a full weekend, every time, and I dreaded it.
QuickBooks connects to the bank and pulls every transaction in on its own. The first month you tell it what each one is. After that it guesses, based on what you said last time, and it is right often enough that categorising a month of transactions is mostly clicking Accept. Invoices go out by email with a pay by card button, and customers use it, which means we get paid faster than when they had to find their chequebook.
The feature that changed my behaviour, though, was overdue reminders. I used to write those awful 'just following up on this invoice' emails myself, and I would put them off because they felt awkward. Now the software sends them on a schedule, politely, and I only get involved when someone is properly late. Quarter end is now about an hour, and most of that is reading through what the software already sorted.
Two small irritations. The bank feed occasionally pulls in the same transaction twice, and untangling that is more fiddly than it should be. And the phone app is fine for snapping a receipt but frustrating for anything more than that. Use it on a laptop.
The tiny one. Fifteen minutes to set up, and I have never once regretted it.
You know the email. 'Does Tuesday work for you? No? What about Thursday, maybe 3pm? Oh, you are in a different time zone.' Multiply that by every meeting in a week. Calendly kills it. You connect your calendar, tell it which hours you are willing to take meetings, and share a link. The other person picks a slot that is free for both of you and the meeting lands in both calendars with a video link already attached.
I keep three links: a 15 minute intro call, a 30 minute client check in, and a 60 minute working session. Each has buffer time built in so I am not back to back all afternoon, which was a problem I created for myself early on by being too generous with availability.
One thing I have noticed is that some people find being handed a booking link a little cold, especially in a first exchange. So for new contacts I still suggest two or three times in the email itself, and add the link underneath as an alternative. Most people use the link anyway.
Print it. Sign it. Scan it. Email it. Wait. Send a gentle nudge. Wait some more. We once had a straightforward supplier agreement take eleven days to come back because the other person's office printer was broken and they kept meaning to use the one at home. When I finally tracked it, the average contract was taking most of a week to get fully signed.
With DocuSign you upload the PDF, drag signature and date boxes to where they need to go, and hit send. The recipient signs in their browser or on their phone. Both sides get a copy, and there is a record of who signed and when, which has settled at least one 'I never agreed to that' conversation. For agreements we send regularly I have saved templates so the boxes are already placed, and sending one takes about a minute.
If I have a complaint, it is the price. DocuSign charges a fair bit for what is, when you think about it, a simple job. If you send a handful of documents a month there are cheaper tools that do the same thing perfectly well. We stuck with it because clients recognise the name and never question it, which is worth something.
Payroll was the job I was most scared of, because a mistake is not an inconvenience, it is someone's rent. For two years I ran it in a spreadsheet with formulas I had built myself and checked against a calculator every single month, because I did not entirely trust the formulas and I did not entirely trust myself.
Gusto does the sums, files the tax paperwork, and pays people by direct deposit on the day you set. New hires get a link and fill in their own details, so I am no longer typing someone's bank account number from a photo they sent me on a Sunday night. A normal pay run is three clicks and a review screen. The first time I ran it I spent twenty minutes checking every figure against my old spreadsheet. Everything matched, and I have not opened that spreadsheet since.
It is very much built for US payroll. If your team is spread across countries you will need something else for the international side, and stitching the two together is not much fun. Their support has also been slower to reply than I would like on a couple of occasions, though the answers were good when they came.
Our old expense process involved paper receipts, sellotape, an A4 sheet, and a claim form that someone typed up, someone else checked, and a third person paid. It worked, in the sense that people eventually got their money, but it was slow and nobody enjoyed any part of it.
Now you photograph the receipt and Expensify reads the shop, the date and the amount off it. Receipts pile into a report, the report goes to whoever approves it, and the money goes out. The photo stays attached forever, so when my accountant asks about a taxi ride from eight months ago it takes seconds to pull up rather than an afternoon of digging through folders.
It also flags duplicates, which I did not think we needed until it caught two in the first month. Not anything dishonest, just the same train ticket submitted twice by mistake. That would have sailed through before.
The receipt reading is good, not perfect. Faded thermal paper and handwritten receipts often come through with the wrong amount and need a quick fix. I have learned to skim every claim before approving rather than trusting the scan blindly.
Our social media used to depend entirely on someone remembering. Which meant it happened late, or in a rush, or not at all for a fortnight and then three posts in a day. Buffer lets you write a whole week's posts in one sitting, pick which accounts each goes to, and set the day and time. Then it publishes them for you.
I block out an hour on Monday morning, load the week, and do not think about it again. The stats are basic but they were enough to notice, over a few months, that our rough behind the scenes photos got far more engagement than the polished announcements we had been agonising over. So now we make more of the rough ones and spend less time on the polished ones. That single observation probably paid for the subscription.
A couple of caveats. Some platforms seem to give scheduled posts a bit less reach than posts made natively, and certain formats like polls do not always work through a scheduler. For anything that really matters I still post directly in the app.
Support was the single biggest hole in my week, and the reason was the shared inbox. Everything came into support@ and everyone could see it, which sounds fine until two people answer the same customer, the customer gets two slightly different answers, and a third email from someone else gets missed entirely because both people assumed the other had it.
Freshdesk turns each email into a ticket. A ticket has one owner and a status, so at any moment you can see what is open, who has it, and how long it has been waiting. Saved replies cover the questions we get every day. And the help centre, which took me an afternoon to write, quietly answers a lot of questions before they ever become tickets.
I tracked two numbers for the six months after we moved over. The graph below has both.
A word of warning from my own mistake. Freshdesk has a great many settings, and when I first set it up I spent about a week building clever automatic routing rules. Then I deleted nearly all of them because tickets were bouncing between people in circles. Start with the basics and only add rules when you feel a specific pain.
Every time someone new joined, I lost two days sitting beside them explaining how we do things. Not because the processes were complicated, but because they lived in my head and in a scattering of old email attachments, some of which were three versions out of date.
Notion is where all of that lives now. Each process has a page with the steps, a few screenshots, and usually a short screen recording. New people read the page first and come to me with actual questions rather than for the basics. The search is the part that makes it work. Type 'refund' and you get the refund process, the email template we use, and notes on the last few refund decisions, all on one screen. That used to be three separate conversations with three separate people.
I will say this plainly: Notion is a blank canvas, and blank canvases need discipline. Without someone owning the structure, it turns into a pile of half finished pages within a few months. Ours got messy enough after the first year that I spent a full day cleaning it out. Now I do a small tidy at the end of every month and it stays usable.
The ten tools are not equal in effort. Some took me half an hour to set up and some ate most of a week. The graph below plots setup time against the hours each one saves us every week, using my own notes.
So, in order:
• Calendly and DocuSign first. An hour between them, and you feel the difference the same day.
• Zapier next, once you have decided which apps you are actually keeping, so there is something to connect.
• QuickBooks and Gusto before your next quarter end or pay run, whichever is closer.
• Freshdesk the moment more than one person is answering customer emails.
• HubSpot, Notion, Expensify and Buffer once the rest is humming along. These are the ones that need looking after.
When I added it all up last month, those ten tools had taken my manual work from roughly 45 hours a week to about nine. I want to be careful not to oversell that. Nine is not zero. I still go through the books, still check the automation logs on Fridays, still tidy the knowledge base. But the nine hours are spent reading and deciding, not typing the same thing into three different places, and that is a different kind of tired at the end of the day.
What I did not expect was the drop in mistakes. The missed follow ups, the invoice nobody chased, the receipt claimed twice. Looking back, none of those were laziness. They were just what happens when a person does repetitive work for long enough. Software is dull and consistent in precisely the way people are not, and for this kind of work, dull and consistent is exactly what you want.
If you take one thing from this, let it be: do not sign up for all ten at once. I tried that early on with a different set of tools, got excited, and six months later was paying for six subscriptions I barely opened. Pick the one task that annoys you most. Replace it. Live with the new tool for a month before you touch anything else. It is slower, but everything I kept, I kept because it earned its place.
And if you want a place to start, make it the meeting booking link. Fifteen minutes on a quiet afternoon, and you get to feel what it is like when a job simply stops existing. That feeling is what kept me going through the other nine.
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