Startups
Business management software for startups that report to somebody
Burn, cards, payroll and revenue on one ledger. Business management software for startups that still holds up in year three, the week an investor asks to see everything.
- 2 to 10 people
- Cards and limits for the team
- Books an investor can read
The numbers a board asks for are the same numbers you need on a Monday. Most startups end up building two systems anyway.
Runway
14 months
Is this the right page for you?
- You have a small team and a plan that depends on money you have not earned yet.
- Somebody outside the company asks you for numbers: an investor, a grant body, a lender.
- Spending happens on personal cards and gets reimbursed later, badly.
- You are hiring, and payroll is about to become a monthly event.
- You want books that survive diligence without being rebuilt first.
- You are a business of one with nobody to pay.
- You have a shop floor and stock to count.
- You have several legal entities and a group audit.
What breaks in the first two years
None of it is dramatic. It is six small failures of record keeping that only become expensive at exactly the wrong moment.
Nobody knows the burn until month end
Spending is spread across personal cards, transfers and the company account. The real monthly figure only appears when somebody reconciles it, about three weeks late.
Every outflow lands in one spend record as it happens, categorised, with the receipt attached. Burn becomes a number you can look at on a Tuesday.
Spend ControlsReimbursements eat goodwill
A staff member funds a company purchase from their own account and waits to be paid back. Twice. Then they stop volunteering.
Issue a card with its own limit and category rules. The spend belongs to the company from the start, so nobody is ever out of pocket for doing their job.
Expense CardsPayroll is a manual event
Salaries, deductions and pension are worked out in a sheet each month, and that sheet has exactly one author who understands it.
Payroll runs on a schedule against staff records that already exist. Deductions calculate, payslips issue, and the entry posts itself to the books.
PayrollRevenue is hard to prove
Money arrives through several channels and somebody has to argue that a given deposit relates to a given customer.
Each customer gets a dedicated account number, so revenue arrives already attributed. Invoiced, settled and outstanding reconcile themselves.
Account IssuingDue diligence turns into a fire drill
An investor asks for eighteen months of records and the team stops shipping for a fortnight to produce them.
The books are written as the year happens, with the document behind every entry. Export is a report you run, not a year you reconstruct.
BookkeepingNobody can show who approved what
A spending limit exists in somebody's head. It gets breached, and there is no record of the decision either way.
Approval rules per person and per category, with the decision attached to the transaction it authorised. Who asked, who approved, and when.
Spend Controls₦0
to open your account. No setup fee and no minimum contract, so a pre-revenue month costs nothing.
1 ledger
behind payroll, cards, invoices and expenses. Diligence reads one system rather than five.
3 logins
on Starter, which covers a founding team before Growth becomes necessary.
A Wednesday at a ten-person company
No finance hire, no month-end scramble. Each entry is a decision somebody made, recorded by the act of making it.
Standup, then a card
A designer needs a paid tool. You issue a card capped at ₦40,000 a month, locked to software. No reimbursement conversation happens.
A customer pays
The transfer lands on that customer's own account number. The invoice closes and the revenue is attributed without anybody guessing.
Hire number eleven
You add them to staff records once. Payroll, access rights and the team list all read from that single entry.
The board pack question
An investor asks for last quarter's burn. You export it in about the time it took them to ask.
Month to date
In, out, and runway in months. Not an estimate somebody assembled, the actual ledger.
What a startup switches on first
Spending first, because that is the clock. Revenue and reporting follow, and the APIs are there for the teams whose product moves money itself.
Control the outflow
The half of the business that decides how long you get.
Bring the money in
Revenue that arrives already attributed to a customer.
Be able to prove it
The part that matters the week somebody asks.
A startup rarely fails because the books were untidy. It fails a month earlier than it needed to, because nobody could see it coming.
Runway is not a quarterly figure. It moves every time a card is used, a salary runs or a customer pays late, and by the time a spreadsheet has caught up, the window to do something about it has closed. Putting spend, payroll and revenue on one ledger is not about tidiness. It is about seeing the trend while there is still time to act on it.
Starter
Three logins, fifty invoices a month, a hundred expenses and thirty staff records. That covers a founding team and its first hires without paying for capacity nobody is using.
Compare all plans- 3 team logins
- 50 invoices a month
- 100 expenses a month
- 200 customer records
- 30 staff records
- Up to 3 stores
When you outgrow it: Usually the fourth login, or the month headcount passes thirty. Growth lifts logins to ten and staff records to a hundred and fifty.
Questions about business management software for startups
Mostly asked by the founder who has just been handed the finance job on top of their real one.
What is the best business management software for startups?
For an early team it is whichever system puts spending, payroll and revenue on one ledger from the first month. The specific features matter less than the fact that there is one record rather than four. Startups that stitch together separate tools usually rebuild the whole thing during their first serious diligence process.
How do I track burn rate and runway?
Burn is only useful if it is current. Because every card payment, salary run, invoice and expense posts to the same ledger as it happens, the monthly outflow and the runway that follows from it are live figures rather than something assembled three weeks after the month closed.
Can I give the team company cards without a finance department?
Yes. Issue a card per person with its own monthly cap and the categories it is allowed to be used in. Spending outside those rules is declined at the point of purchase, which is a much easier conversation than reversing it afterwards.
Will an investor accept these books during due diligence?
The thing that fails diligence is usually not the format, it is the gaps. Because entries are created by the transaction and carry their supporting document, what you export is complete rather than reconstructed. Your accountant can still take it into whatever reporting standard your investor works in.
Do you handle payroll deductions and pension?
Yes. Payroll runs against your staff records, calculates deductions, issues payslips and posts the accounting entry. Staff who join or leave part way through a month prorate rather than needing a manual correction.
Can our own product take payments through Niimbu?
Yes. Collections, payouts, account issuing, card issuing and identity verification are all available as APIs, so a product that needs to move money can use the same rails and the same records the rest of the business runs on.
What happens to our data if we outgrow Niimbu?
It leaves with you. Records stay exportable, including if you cancel, and no plan holds your history hostage as a reason to stay.
Not quite the right size?
Businesses move along this scale, sometimes within a year. The page either side of this one may describe you better today.
The simpler way to scale your business!
Start free and see it working today, or talk to us about pricing for teams and higher volumes.