Client management. Bookkeeping. Service delivery. When you own a micro-business, you wear all the hats, so it’s critical to have tools that can flexibly meet all your needs. 

“[For me], day-to-day is a balancing act of making connections with existing and new clients first thing in the morning when the brain is fresh, then diving into addressing any problems coming in overnight, then getting down to working on new business projects,” says Nicole Darechuk, owner of the Ottawa-based tech firm ND Consulting. 

Darechuk is a micro-business owner, as are many of her clients, so she knows first-hand how the right tech can boost a company’s bottom line.

“Tools are critical to supporting the workflow systems I use to deliver on the work I do,” Darechuk says. But for micro-business owners like Darechuk and her clients, not just any solution will do. It’s about finding the right apps and infrastructure to add efficiencies—not complexity.

“All I need”

From her accounting software to her communications suite, Darechuk needs technology that helps her do more with less. It’s all about simplicity—tools that are not only easy to use, but that deliver all of the functionalities Darechuk and her clients need within a simple interface. For Darechuk, that starts with Wave, a financial management platform that was purpose-built for entrepreneurs, freelancers and other micro-businesses.

“Wave has been a part of my tech stack for several years,” Darechuk says. “I use it to send estimates, deposit invoices, process invoices, manage reports, automatically import transactions from several bank accounts and as a payment processor. I love the options they have for clients to submit direct bank payments so both sides save on credit card fees.”

Not only does Wave make the critical work of managing money simpler and faster, Darechuk loves that it frees up time to grow her business. 

“I made the switch to Wave a long time ago and for me, I saw a significant decrease in the amount of time it took to manage every transaction that hit the books,” she says. “This helped me to boost my profit margins and bandwidth to take on more work.” 

Making tech easy

When it comes to platforms that enable Darechuk and her clients to power their technology—websites and apps, AI, cloud communication, and everything else—the imperative is similar: fast, streamlined solutions that are easy to access and manage. 

Darechuk likes Amazon’s AWS—the same platform Wave itself runs on and the power behind many of the world’s largest and most reliable cloud software services.

“I made the jump into AWS after finding I was using multiple platforms to manage various services and it was taking too much time. Having all of my resources hosted and managed with AWS has decreased the time it takes to administer all services for all clients,” Darechuk says. “The biggest benefit to AWS for me is being able to access and manage a variety of services from one platform. AWS makes it easy to spin up new servers, websites, email, development environments and more in minutes and it has intuitive integrations and automations available at a click of a button to interconnect some of those services.”

At the end of the day, these tools reduce the grind of running a business and allow Darechuk to focus on her goal of helping clients grow and innovate. 

“Wave and AWS provide me with comfort and confidence that these core systems will be there every day when I get up and start work. I don’t stress about whether a service is unavailable. I don’t worry I will miss a notification and I never worry about the security aspect because the platforms are so well built,” she says.