Killing the spreadsheets and manual processes, one modern finance app at a time.
A few applications that can help you automate your invoicing and enable your customers to pay in a way that suits them best. There are quite a lot of modern billing options; we only picked the three that are the most popular and differentiated.
Stripe is a go-to payment and billing solution for modern marketplaces and SaaS subscription businesses.
✓ Big and growing app marketplace of tools that integrate with it.
✓ We use it at Pento and love it.
GoCardless is a simple service for collecting Direct Debit payments online, serving more businesses than any other Direct Debit provider.
✓ Specialized in the UK direct debit payments.
Below are two tools that can help you run UK payroll internally in the most simple and automated way possible.
Please note: there are several options for running payroll in the UK. Since our own solution (Pento) is in this category we only included two other tools that are highly differentiated from Pento.
Pento makes it simple for internal finance team to run payroll in just a few clicks. It calculates taxes, makes all the payments, reports to HMRC & pension providers and connects to other cloud applications. No more spreadsheets and long emails.
Deel is the payroll platform for remote teams that connects localized compliance and payments in one system of record. Helping businesses hire anyone anywhere, either as independent contractors or full time employees (EOR).
Boundless is an employment platform for your international team. Compliantly employ your remote people, get set up to handle payroll & tax filings.
A collection of tools to help you automate the traditionally very time consuming accounts payable process (invoice approval and payments automation).
Great tool for complete automation of accounts payable: just send in an invoice, they turn it into structured data and pay via your bank. Now opening up for the first UK customers.
✓ We use it at Pento and love it.
Digitise your manual AP processes and stop worrying about invoices being left behind in the office. Connects to Xero, but no banking connection currently.
Automate accounts payable data capture and invoice coding. Review and approve purchase bills before you export to your cloud accounting software. No banking connection currently.
Pay company bills and expenses with one click. Seamless integration with Xero or Quickbooks, and your bank.
✓ Very young product, but solely focused on the UK market.
A few modern tools to help your employees seamlessly make expenses on behalf of the company without much overhead.
Smart credit cards for your business. No more expense reports, no more out-of-pocket spending.
✓ A ton of very positive user reviews.
✓ We use it at Pento and love it.
Spend management software with corporate cards to help businesses take control of spending.
✓ Robust feature set including subscription management and invoice payments.
A modern take on managing all sorts of business expenses in the UK: from cards to out-of-pocket claims and expenses.
✓ Very UK centric features set.
The so-called pre-accounting tool for accountants and bookkeepers. Mainly used for automatic scanning of receipts and invoices and filling it into your accounting system.
✓ Big network of accounting partners across UK.
The old and robust expense solution used by millions of businesses around the world. Current minus in the UK is the lack of company expense cards (like the ones from Pleo, Spendesk, Expend or Soldo).
Integrated with Xero, QuickBooks Online, Sage and other accounting systems, it is a spend management solution that enables businesses of any size to capture receipts, monitor data & generate reports.
✓ Based in the UK.
These neobanks are not yet ready to accommodate finance needs of a bigger company. But if you are just starting out or have a small company these neobanks are becoming interesting banking options. Their advantage lies in modern interfaces and growing number of integrations with other apps.
Revolut Business solution has now been around for quite a few years and has grown into a nice platform that can help you with expense reporting, invoice payments, has an open API, and more.
✓ Growing app ecosystem of partner apps.
Has a similar feature set to Revolut Business, with less emphasis on the open API and app marketplace (it does connect to Xero and a few other accounting apps).
✓ From the anecdotal experience it seems that customers really like it.
Tide was built purposefully as a neobank for freelancers and small businesses. It has less funding compared to the big competitors above, but the feature set is pretty similar.
The third big UK neobank has recently also launched a business account. It has the least number of features for now but probably worth checking out if you love their consumer app and you run a very small company.
Interesting neobank option for freelancers and very small companies that combines banking and accounting features in one solution.
✓ Seems like very loved by customers.
Here are a few modern options to help you fund your business. From salary financing, to invoice protection, crowdfunding and all the way to modern SMB loans.
Simple and modern way to get a small business loan. Now also specialized in helping businesses get CBILS loans.
✓ Seems like very loved by customers.
With quick decisions and easy set-up, you can get funds and get on with your business. Similarly to Iwoca it's also offering CBILS funding.
Boost your cash flow with a business loan from £50,001 to £250,000 to support your business through coronavirus and have nothing to pay for 12 months (via BBLS and CBILS loans).
They help recruitment agencies, consultancies, staffing platforms & individuals get paid with simple, fast invoice finance. Now also offering CBILS loans.
Fast, flexible loans from £10k to £1m. There is no interest payments - just a flat fee that you pay as your sales grow.
✓ Specialized in financing internet businesses (e-commerce, SaaS, etc.)
Turn your invoices data into revenue. Get up to 5% of your invoices value by selling invoice data. Not sure what are the implications on privacy here.
Their launch product, Invoice Protection, is all about making sure businesses get paid. It's a modern take on business invoice insurance.
Here a few apps to help you analyse your budgets and do advanced forecasting and move beyond the good old Excel.
Their suite of reporting tools enables Virtual CFO reporting, strategic planning, goal-setting, budgeting, forecasting, multi-entity and more. Works with Xero, Quickbooks, Sage.
Fluidly helps business owners sleep better at night by providing control, certainty and confidence around cashflow - the single biggest issue for SMEs. They apply machine learning to transaction data from accounting systems to automate the forecasting, optimisation and protection of cashflow.
Futrli is the all in one forecasting & reporting tool for business owners and accountants.
✓ Big customer base of over 45,000 users.
Fathom is an easy to use management reporting and financial analysis tool, which helps you to assess business performance, monitor trends and identify improvement opportunities. It integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks, Xero and MYOB.
Digits is a very new entrant to the financial analytics space. Currently they offer insight into your expenses and connect to Xero, Quickbooks, etc.
✓ Top tier Silicon Valley team behind it.
A data cleanup and reporting tool purposefully focused on working great with Xero.
✓ Seems like the only tool focused on helping you clean up Xero data.
The two applications below are specifically built for subscription businesses that run on a popular payment processor like Stripe.
SaaS & subscription reporting, analytics & metrics for Stripe, Braintree, Chargify, Recurly and PayPal. In one click you get your standard SaaS metrics: MRR, LTV, churn rate, cohort analysis...
A set of outcome-centered products that reduce churn, optimize pricing, and grow your subscription business end-to-end.
✓ Core SaaS metrics product is free forever.
Managing your company cap table and stock option grants in a spreadsheet quickly becomes a big mess. Especially once your company starts scaling and adding a lot of shareholders and option holders. Here we present two most notable solutions for this right now in the UK.
Their platform makes it easy to distribute and manage your equity. Built for SMEs by the UK’s share scheme experts.
These two solutions below can help you streamline all your contract workflows, use digital signatures and have one secure storage for all your company contracts.
Juro is an end-to-end contract collaboration and management platform that helps businesses agree terms faster, while giving deep insight into contract data. The AI-enabled system offers document creation, negotiation, e-signing and analytics, saving businesses up to 96% of time.
✓ Based in the UK.
Contractbook is efficient contract management for the modern business. Create, sign and store all your legal documents on a single digital platform to increase transparency in your organisation, secure compliance and save valuable time.
A few modern POS solutions in case your business has a retail presence and wants to accept payments. Just like with billing options, there are quite a lot of solutions out there, but we'll only mention two most modern ones here.
Accept card payments and get paid fast with Square. Take chip and PIN and contactless payments face-to-face with Square Reader, take payments remotely with their digital invoices and virtual terminal and track it all in one place with Square Dashboard.
Multi-user mobile POS solution that supports card and cash payments as well as extensive reporting.
The below tools enable you to effectively move away from messy spreadsheets for managing hourly workers and their work schedules.
Complete staff schedules in minutes and publish them with a click. You can also easily manage staff leave, track time & attendance, and sync your timesheets to payroll seamlessly.
Allocate shifts, communicate with staff, and streamline payroll faster and more affordably.
✓ EU based with strong UK presence.
A few of the most notable apps to run your company accounting for different size of businesses. Obviously there are many more accounting software options out there. Currently we only list one app for each company size segment (starting from the smallest and finishing with the biggest).
Great accounting option for freelancers and very small businesses in the UK.
The modern SMB accountancy king in the UK.
✓ Extremely rich app ecosystem.
Go-to cloud accounting option for fast growing businesses that outgrow Xero and Quickbooks and need a more scalable and customizable solution.
✓ Bigger and bigger app ecosystem.
Because we now have an explosion of cloud applications, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem to keep all the data in sync. Here we present a few interesting option to help you automate and keep your important financial data in sync.
This is a very flexible automation platform that enables you to set up various if-this-then-this automation scenarios. Integrates with Xero, Stripe, various CRMs, Google Sheets, etc.
✓ We use it at Pento and love it.
Easily sync information between your cloud applications. For example you can sync customers from Stripe to Xero, etc.
With greater and greater real-time visibility into the status of invoice payments we can now also automate the age-old and super time consuming accounts receivable dunning process. Below you can find the top two tools in this category.
Chaser automates invoice chasing and streamlines your accounts receivable process, to get you paid on time - in less time.
This handy tool can help you automatically chase unpaid invoices. Manage your invoices, from sending to payment. It seems very promising.
Below we've collected a bunch of tools that don't belong in any of the well-established categories above, but can be a big help to any UK finance team.
Faster and friction-free way to claim R&D tax credits at a fraction of the cost of using traditional advisors.
✓ Seems to have very good customer ratings.
Legal automation platform designed for startups and investors to create all the documents they need to do a UK funding round.
✓ Seems to be adored by UK startups.
Payment services for accountants. This app enables you to manage payables service and take the payment workload away from clients, perfect for payroll and supplier payments.
Smart, fully customisable UK business insurance. Covers a wide variety of industries.
✓ Seems to be very popular with customers.
Business account for simple and cheap multinational bank transfers.
✓ We use it at Pento and love it.
Book and manage all your business travel in one place. The result is a smoother travel management experience for all employees.
Harvest makes it easy to track time. It then collates this timesheet data into intuitive, visual reports that make it easy to see what your team is working on, catch projects before they go over budget, and make more intelligent decisions about your business.
Klarna helps e-commerce businesses make a smoother checkout experience by enabling their customers to pay via quick consumer loans.
Back is a modern employee service platform that enables finance teams to manage and automate employee requests and recurring workflows. Finance teams use Back to respond to requests from employees, track approvals, automate recurring workflows, and collaborate with other teams such as HR.
Pento customers spend up to 80% less time on payroll and have a much easier payroll process with fewer errors.
Getting paid for hard work is an essential element to our livelihood. Yet, at the same time, it is often one of the least digitally advanced and user-friendly experiences we offer to our employees. We are here to change that. We want to make it flexible and easy to get paid and enable everyone to choose for themselves how and when they want it done.
Pento Services Limited
St James House,
13 Kensington Square, London, United Kingdom, W8 5HD
CN: 12311368
