4 Best Financial Tools Every Business Should Use (September, 2026)

Despite how financially turbulent these past two years have been, a survey commissioned by Staples Canada shows that 82% of small business owners are optimistic about the future.

Conditions continue to improve: only 32% of businesses remain fully remote, while 54% say they plan on implementing hybrid work conditions. As long as more people get vaccinated and the country gets better at navigating safety, the business sector is sure to make a steady recovery.

Given that technology lies at the center of the pandemic recovery, small businesses need to stay on top of tech solutions to continue this trend of growth.

Even beyond remote work and the pandemic, many digital innovations available today can help companies streamline their operations. That said, here are a few financial tools every business should use.

Contactless payment apps

Contactless payment solutions like Square have become a vital part of the retail industry during the age of social distancing.

Through the use of RFID technology, merchants can use Square to accept payments from any credit or debit card without the need for PINs, signatures, or even card swipes, thus reducing the risk of contamination.

As the money moves directly from the card to the merchant’s bank account, Square makes the Point of Sale faster for both the customer and merchant.

Tax calculator

It can be difficult to stay on top of tax laws, especially when your income is spread across businesses and investments. This is especially true in Canada since tax mandates are different per province. Fortunately, there are many tools that allow business owners to get a clearer image of how much they owe the government.

Using Wealthsimple’s Quebec tax calculator, businesses in the province can input their self-employed income, capital gains, dividends from private and public companies, as well as additional income, in order to compute how much they will owe in federal tax, provincial tax, and local pension plan premiums.

The website also provides tax calculators for other Canadian provinces. This way, you can stay prepared for tax season without having to worry about confusing tax formulas.

Accounting software

Keep track of business cash flow by investing in quality accounting software. The most well-known accounting software is the Intuit program QuickBooks. Versatile and easy to navigate, Quickbooks can be used to track income, expenses, employee payroll, and bills. One convenient feature QuickBooks offers is receipt scanning.

Rather than having to physically store receipts to keep track of spending, you can take a snapshot and save it to QuickBooks, which inputs the data onto your expense reports and saves the photo to the cloud. You can even use QuickBooks to create the very invoices you send to your clients.

With accounting software like QuickBooks, you take away lot of the tedious manual effort involved in bookkeeping and accounting, allowing you to easily maintain your financial health.

Check out some of our other top picks for business accounting solutions:

• Bench
• Freshbooks

Loan calculator

If you lack the capital necessary to invest in business development, you may have to take out a loan. A loan calculator can help you determine whether you can realistically pay off the loan you need.

With Comparewise’s Personal Loan Calculator, you can calculate how much you need to pay off each month based on a given loan amount and loan duration. It also shows you how much you need to pay if you were settling debt on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

The pandemic forced nearly every business to adapt to technology to survive. Now, as the world moves closer to safety and normalcy, businesses need to adopt new tech tools to thrive.

Tools like contactless payment apps, accounting software, tax calculators, and loan calculators can make business operations easier and more efficient.

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