Tag Archive for: business

Claire Christmas

Our Trusted Suppliers after 15+ Years

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The Best Business Tools for UK SMEs

It’s that time of year when suppliers, landlords and even hiring costs all increase in price…and businesses start reviewing their outgoings.

Dogsbody Technology has been incorporated for over 16 years, and we’re often asked which suppliers we use to run our business efficiently.

Over the years, we’ve discovered some fantastic small and large businesses that have genuinely helped our business grow. So, we thought we’d share a few of the gems we’ve found along the way.

FreeAgent

You may have heard of Xero or QuickBooks but in our opinion FreeAgent comes out on top.

While all three platforms will manage your business finances, FreeAgent has a major advantage for UK businesses. It’s based in Edinburgh, Scotland, which means UK-specific financial and government changes are implemented quickly. Plus, their support team is UK-based and consistently delivers excellent customer service.

Simply put, accounting software is one of the most important tools all companies needed from day one.  We’ve been using FreeAgent for over 15 years and can’t recommend them highly enough.

Wise Bank Account

160+ countries, 40 currencies, one account

If you do transactions in a currency other than GBP, then Wise will save you time and money.

We use multiple Wise currency accounts to support our international customers and suppliers. By holding funds in multiple currencies we avoid unnecessary exchange rate losses and fees.  When we do need to convert funds, the fees are transparent and competitive.

In fact, the ease of paying in other currencies has sometimes made it cheaper for us to pay suppliers in currency other than GBP.

For any business working internationally, Wise is a game changer.

Gocardless

10 years ago we needed to invoice, over 100 customers, a small monthly subscription fee. Relying on manual BACS payments created unnecessary admin when invoices went unpaid.

GoCardless solved that problem.

GoCardless allowed us to collect payments via Direct Debit and integrates with FreeAgent – meaning invoices are automatically reconciled. No chasing. No manual matching of payments. No wasted admin time.

It was incredibly easy to set up, works for multiple currencies, and has saved us both time and money year after year.

VivoHR

Whilst we use a lot of software and digital services, we can’t overlook the true value of real people especially the HR Professionals at VivoHR.

As a small business without an in-house HR department, VivoHR is our trusted HR partner. From writing employees contracts, to supporting HR duties, policies, and navigating new Government Acts, they’ve guided us every step of the way.

We’ve also had the pleasure of watching this dedicated small business grow over the years – something that’s always lovely to see.

If you need HR support, calling VivoHR might just be one of the best decisions you make.

Non-Affiliate link to VivoHR

BreatheHR

When small businesses begin hiring staff, the admin quickly adds up. Like many others, we managed holiday and sickness tracking on a spreadsheet for several years. It worked – until it was time to level up.  That’s when we moved to BreatheHR.

BreatheHR not only simplifies our holiday management, sickness and absence tracking, but also allows us to securely store employee records and documents in the cloud – all fully GDPR-compliant.

Federation of Small Businesses (FSB)

The FSB legal library is worth the membership fee alone. They also influence changes in government for small businesses. Dogsbody have been a member for over 14 years.

Benefits included in your membership are:

  • 24/7 legal advice line
  • Online legal library including 1,500+ documents and templates like contracts, guides, letters, policies etc
  • Legal expenses insurance
  • insurance policies like tax investigation protection and employment tribunal insurance up to £100,000 per claim
  • Plus much more

Tresorit

For secure file sharing, we use Tresorit – a highly secure alternative to Dropbox. Fully end-to-end encrypted and protected by Swiss privacy laws (among the strongest in the world), Tresorit enables safe collaborative working both internally and externally.

The ease of secure file sharing to anywhere in the world in seconds.

Slack

As non-Microsoft users, Slack is our communication hub. We use it internally, with customers, and suppliers. The ability to have shared but separated channels with external parties in the same tool that we use for staff has been a game changer… and yes, the /giphy game is strong with this one.

No matter where in the world our team works, Slack keeps everyone connected.

* no gifs were harmed in the writing of this blog post.

Dogsbody Technology is vendor agnostic, we work with all providers.  We will always recommend the best location for our customers infrastructure. Here is just a handful of providers we use in our business.

Netdata

It’s not hyperbole to to say we have and continue to use a lot of monitoring solutions but honestly, Netdata has changed the game! We are a power use of their monitoring now and work closely with them to improve the product for everyone. The amount of data you get out of a single client is amazing (200+ graphs of historic data to the second resolution by default) and their plugin architecture means we have never been left wondering what was going on in some infrastructure.

We are now utilising their Kubernetes offering which offers so much visibility of what can be a very complex solution.

Linode (Akamai Cloud)

We recommend Linode (now Akamai Cloud) to customers who are starting out or have limited stats on what their applications etc need resources and infrastructure wise. Linode is low cost and can easily adjust infrastructure size as demand grows or resources balloon.

Digital Ocean

Digital Ocean are similar to Linode and great if companies want to distribute infrastructure across providers.

Backblaze

Backblaze are a cheaper alternative for storage to AWS, quite simply it saves us a huge amount of money.  S3 compatible and a 1/5 the cost of AWS S3 with free egress up to 3x the average monthly data stored, Backblaze reduced ours and our customers backup costs significantly. Its usually one of the first changes we recommend when customers are looking to save money.

ClouDNS

ClouDNS has been a recent supplier to Dogsbody but we are already impressed by their service. Rock solid DNS (you can be sure we have been monitoring them) and a growing offering of services each year. ClouDNS are the epitome of the linux philosophy, do one thing very well.

Of course their are a lot of options for your business and your needs with vary but we hope this helps you see what a small business uses day to day.

If you want to talk to us about anything we have mentioned in this blog post or want Linux or Cloud infrastructure support get in contact.

Dan Benton

We Are Growing

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It’s an exciting time at Dogsbody Technology. After a couple of years of working from home we’ve decided to move into an office.  And a very nice office it is too.

Our new address is:
Dogsbody Technology Ltd.
377 – 399 London Road,
Camberley,
Surrey
GU15 3HL

We’ve moved into Basepoint Camberley which offers serviced offices and unlike many office providers is owned by the profit making arm of a leading UK grant charity. It’s nice to know that the rent we now pay is ultimately going to a good cause.

You may also have heard us talk about more people in the office. We have moved in with fellow tech company Orcare Ltd. a web development agency that builds sites using the Umbraco CMS. It’s a great partnership and one that has already pushed opportunities in both directions.

So if you are in the area and fancy a chat then do feel free to give us a call and pop in. Let us know in advance and we’ll even make sure the (beer) fridge is stocked with your favourite drink.

Feature image – by c_ambler licensed under CC BY 2.0