Running a 10-person company on one suite

This guide is for owners and managers of small companies, around ten people, who want to run on one suite. It suggests an order for adopting apps over about a quarter, starting with mail, calendar and files, plus some habits that keep it tidy.

A company of ten people has a strange problem. It is too big to run on a shared inbox and a few spreadsheets, and too small to have an IT person or a procurement process. So tools get added one at a time, whenever someone has a need. A year later there are a dozen subscriptions, several of them overlapping, and nobody can say who has access to what.

A suite is one answer to that problem. Whatever suite you choose, though, the risk is the same: switching everything on at once, confusing the team, and ending up using none of it well. This guide suggests an order of adoption for a ten-person company and a few habits that keep it tidy. The examples use Nubo Suite, but the sequence holds for most.

Start with the daily basics

Three things are used by everyone, every day, and everything else depends on them: email, calendar and file storage.

Email. Every person needs a mailbox, and the company needs a few shared addresses such as info@, sales@ and accounts@. Decide who reads each shared address. If the answer is “whoever sees it first”, mail will be missed. If you are moving from another provider, see our guide on switching your team’s email without losing a day.

Calendar. Shared calendars beat shared spreadsheets for anything with a date: leave, deadlines, client meetings, and the one room or piece of equipment everybody fights over. Agree a convention early, for example that a meeting is not real until it is on the calendar with a link to the call.

Files. The most useful decision in the first month is where company files live. A shared team drive that belongs to the organisation, not to any one person, means files do not leave when a person does. In Nubo, each team has one shared drive that the team owns rather than a member, with a pooled quota. Whatever you use, set it up so that a departing employee’s work is already in a place the company controls.

At this stage, turn on the security basics too. Ask everyone to use two-step verification, and if your suite lets an administrator require it, require it. It is easier to do this on day one than to retrofit it later. We cover the details in two-step verification and passkeys for teams.

Add conversation next

Once the basics work, add the two tools that replace most internal email: team chat and video meetings.

Chat. Create a small number of channels, not a large number. A reasonable starting set for ten people is one general channel, one per project or client, and one for anything that needs a quick answer. Use threads for replies, so that a channel stays readable. Agree that chat is for quick questions and that decisions get written somewhere permanent, for example in a document or the project itself.

Meetings. Use a standing link for recurring meetings, and put it in the calendar invitation so no one has to hunt for it. Turn on a waiting room for calls that include guests. We walk through settings like this in better meetings.

The test for whether you have got this right: a new colleague can find where a conversation happened a month ago without asking anyone.

Give work a home

By now people are talking to each other, and the next gap is usually that nobody can see who is doing what. Two small tools cover most of it.

A task list per person, for the personal to-do items. It has due dates and priorities and is not shared widely.

A project board per piece of shared work, for anything with more than one person and more than one step. A board with columns such as “To do”, “In progress”, “Review” and “Done” is enough. Resist the urge to add more columns or fields until a real need appears.

If you bill clients by the hour, add time tracking at this point, not later. It is much easier to start recording time when a project begins than to reconstruct it from memory at invoice time. See using projects, tasks and time together for a weekly routine.

Bring in sales and money tools when you feel the need

These tools are valuable, but they are better adopted in response to a problem than in advance.

• A customer list (CRM). When more than one person talks to customers, or when you can no longer remember where each lead stands, move leads and deals out of heads and spreadsheets into a pipeline. Keep stages few, usually five or fewer, and write down what moves a deal from one to the next.
• Invoicing. When you send more than a handful of invoices a month, or chase late payments, an invoicing tool that tracks status, reminders and recurring bills pays for itself. For Indian businesses, see our note on GST invoices for small businesses.
• Accounting. When your accountant asks for the same exports every quarter, put the books in a tool they can also open. Bank statement import, reconciliation and standard reports are the features that matter.
• E-signature. When contracts or approvals are arriving as printed, signed and scanned PDFs, a signing tool saves days.

A common mistake is to adopt all four in the same month. Each one needs a short setup and a habit to go with it. One per quarter is a reasonable pace.

Habits that keep a suite tidy

The tools matter less than the habits around them. These are the ones we would recommend for a team of ten.

1. Name an owner for each tool. It does not need to be a full-time job. It means that when someone asks “how do I do X”, there is a person to ask, and when something needs configuring, there is a person to do it.
2. Write down where things live. A single page, in whatever document tool you use, that says: contracts live here, designs live here, the project plan lives here. Update it when something moves.
3. Use groups, not individuals, for access. Give a team access to a folder or a project rather than adding each person one by one. When someone joins or leaves, you change one list.
4. Decide what is shared outside the company. If your suite lets administrators restrict sharing to people inside the organisation, decide whether to switch that on. It is a simple way to prevent a file from being sent to the wrong person by mistake.
5. Review access quarterly. Open the member list and remove anyone who has left. It takes five minutes and closes a very common gap.
6. Retire what you replace. When you move a function into the suite, cancel the old tool by a set date. Otherwise the team will keep using both.

A sample first-quarter plan

Here is one way to pace the first three months:

• Weeks 1 to 2: Mailboxes, shared addresses, calendars and the team drive. Everyone enables two-step verification.
• Weeks 3 to 4: Team chat and a standing meeting link. Agree the channel structure.
• Weeks 5 to 8: Task lists and one project board for the most active piece of work. Time tracking if you bill by the hour.
• Weeks 9 to 12: Whichever of CRM, invoicing or e-signature you most miss. Cancel the tools you have replaced.

Check in at the end of each phase. Ask the team two questions: what is easier now, and what is still annoying? Fix the annoying parts before adding the next layer.

What a suite does not do for you

It is worth being plain about the limits. A suite reduces the number of logins, invoices and places to look. It does not decide your processes, and it will not fix a team that has not agreed who owns what. Spend your first month on the agreements (who reads which address, where files go, how decisions are recorded) and the tools will have something to hold onto.

For current plans and what each includes, see the pricing page.