Nobody sets out to run their business on a stack of apps. It happens one sensible decision at a time.
You open, so you need a till. You hire, so you need a rota. A customer wants an invoice, so you sign up for an invoicing tool. Receipts start piling up, so an expenses app arrives. Each one has a free trial, then a monthly fee that seems small.
Two years later, you're paying for all of them, and every one holds a slightly different version of your business.
Step 1: List what you actually pay for
Open your bank statement and find every software subscription. For a typical small business it looks something like this:
- Till / POS software: a flat monthly fee
- Stock and purchase orders: sometimes part of the till, often an add-on
- Rota and shift planning: usually per employee
- HR records and leave: usually per employee
- Invoicing and payment links: a flat fee, or a cut of each payment
- Expense receipts: usually per person who claims
- Projects and tasks: usually per user
Watch for the per-person ones. They're cheap with three staff and expensive with twelve, and they grow every time you hire.
Step 2: Count the time between the apps
The subscriptions are only part of the cost. The bigger one is everything that happens between the apps:
- Re-typing a customer from the invoicing tool into the project tool.
- Checking the holiday spreadsheet before you publish the rota.
- Adding the till's takings to the accounts by hand.
- Updating stock after a delivery, because the till doesn't know about purchase orders.
- Removing a leaver from five systems, and hoping you didn't miss one.
Make a rough guess at the hours each week, then multiply by what your time is worth. That figure is usually bigger than the subscriptions.
Step 3: Ask what "connected" would save
When everything shares the same records, most of that in-between work disappears:
- A till sale takes stock down and records its payment in Finance, all in one step.
- A purchase order that's received puts stock back up.
- The rota shows approved leave, because leave and shifts live in the same place.
- A customer is entered once and reused on every invoice, sale and project.
- A leaver is marked Inactive once and loses access to everything.
Do the sum for your business
We built a calculator for exactly this. Tick the tools you use, change the prices to what you actually pay, set your team size, and it compares the total with the Worktree plan that fits.
Every Worktree plan includes every module. The only difference between plans is how many people use it, so the price doesn't climb as you start selling, stocking or invoicing more.
