A client meeting can generate several hours of work after the conversation ends. Notes need to become action items, proposals need drafting, and someone has to follow up. For entrepreneurs balancing business development with day-to-day operations, these tasks can take time away from the customers and decisions that need their attention.

For Bryan Sng, Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of SimpleAI, this is where technology earns its place in the working day. His tools help him move from a conversation to a proposal, from a receipt to an accounting record, and from an idea to something his team can review.

Bryan brings more than 15 years of experience across operations, business development, strategy and regional expansion, including a background in the Republic of Singapore Air Force. He holds an MBA from the National University of Singapore and is pursuing his CPA Australia qualification.

Here are the 5 tech tools used by Justin Loh, Country Manager for Singapore and Brunei, Cohesity, to simplify work

Founded in Singapore in 2023, SimpleAI develops AI automation tools for accounting, finance, human resources and corporate administration. Its products include SAAM for accounting automation, NOVA for accounting and fund management, Opera for corporate secretarial work, and IRIS for HR. The company focuses on reducing repetitive administration while keeping people involved in reviewing information and approving work.

From keeping bookkeeping under control to making more time for client relationships, these are five tools Bryan uses to manage his work.

SAAM for reducing time spent on bookkeeping (Paid)

I use SAAM to handle the bookkeeping tasks that would otherwise take up a significant amount of administrative time. My starting point is simple: I upload bills, receipts and bank statements, and the AI extracts the relevant information and classifies the transactions. I then review the output before publishing it to the accounting system I use. Because it connects with different accounting systems, it fits into the existing workflow instead of requiring me to change everything around it.

The biggest benefit is shifting my attention from entering information to checking it. Bookkeeping still needs oversight, but I would rather spend that time reviewing a prepared record than manually transferring details from one document to another. Data entry and reconciliation that previously took hours have become a much quicker review process. For an entrepreneur balancing operations, customers and business development, that makes a meaningful difference. It helps me keep routine financial administration moving without allowing it to dominate the working day.

NOVA for making month-end accounting easier to manage (Paid)

I use NOVA to manage the accounting workflow from day-to-day records through to month-end reporting. It brings together journals, invoices, bank transactions, foreign exchange revaluation, consolidation and reports. It can also extract information from PDFs and Excel files, which is useful when financial information arrives in different formats and would otherwise need to be entered manually.

What helps me most is having these activities within one system. When accounting work is spread across separate files and processes, completing the books involves a lot of checking, transferring information and following up on outstanding items. NOVA reduces that administrative burden and makes the overall process easier to manage. Moving information over from another accounting system has also been straightforward in our experience.

Month-end used to take up days of attention, and it is now much lighter. I still review the records and reports, but less of my time goes into preparing everything manually. That gives me more room to focus on understanding the numbers and using them to make business decisions.

Claude for research, proposals and testing ideas (Paid)

Claude is the tool I use every day to get more done. After a client meeting, I use it to turn my notes into a structured proposal, so I’m refining a draft rather than starting from a blank page. Before I go after a new market or customer segment, I use it for in-depth research into the industry, the main players, and the problems our ideal customers face. That way, I go into conversations already understanding their world. When I have an idea for a product feature, I use Claude Code to build a working mock-up of the interface, so my product team can see and click through what I mean instead of reading a description. On the M&A side, it does my first round of analysis on potential targets, following the criteria and approach I’ve set, so I can quickly see which opportunities are worth a closer look.

I think of Claude as my ‘first mile.’ It gets me a strong starting point quickly. Then I add my own professional judgement before anything goes out as a final deliverable. What multiplies the time saved is that I can run several tasks at once. I might have Claude researching a market, drafting a proposal and screening an acquisition target all at the same time, while I focus on the work that needs me. It’s like having a team that works in parallel, not an assistant working through one job after another.

Lemlist for keeping sales outreach moving (Paid)

My business team and I use Lemlist, a sales outreach platform, to reach a large number of potential customers in our target markets quickly, with very little manual work.

It lets us run several lead generation campaigns side by side, each set up for a different market or customer profile. For each campaign, we decide who we want to reach, which channels to use, and how the sequence runs: what the emails say, when they go out, when to follow up, and when and how to connect with someone on LinkedIn. Once it’s set up, the campaign runs on its own, and we can see which approaches are getting responses and adjust.

Lead generation needs a wide reach, and you can’t tell in advance which contacts will turn into real opportunities. It makes sense to let automation handle that wide, uncertain top of the funnel. My team can then spend their time where it matters most: building relationships with key accounts and moving serious conversations forward.

Canva AI for turning content into polished presentations (Paid)

I use Canva AI alongside Claude. In my experience, slides built entirely by AI can look generic and don’t always come across well visually, and a presentation’s design matters as much as what it says.

So we split the work. Claude does the heavy lifting on substance: the research, the analysis, the structure and the key messages. Once the team has reviewed and confirmed the content, we move it into Canva AI for the final design touches, so the deck looks polished and on-brand.

We also use Canva to create the images for our marketing campaigns. That means the team spends less time producing visuals and more time on marketing strategy: who we’re targeting, what we want to say, and how each campaign supports our business goals.

Using Claude and Canva together gives us the best of both worlds. We save time without giving up quality.