Stacker-Small Business

  For e-commerce brands, peak season is no longer a single, isolated surge centered around Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the weeks leading up to New Year’s. In 2026, that Q4-focused approach is becoming less reliable. Economic pressures, consumer expectations, trade regulations, AI, and supply chain challenges are all evolving faster than historical trends can

  American manufacturing is growing, but the labor needed to keep that growth running is getting harder to find. New facilities, more complex equipment, and tighter production expectations are all colliding with a shortage of skilled maintenance workers. MaintainX surveyed 211 maintenance and operations leaders to find out how that collision is impacting industrial companies.

  Excel was released in 1985. Forty-one years later, here you are, still using it to run your shop. Spreadsheets are wonderful. Your schedule is on there. Your techs’ repair orders (RO) and updates for the day are found on it. Your service advisors use it to track customers. It’s going well, until it isn’t.

  Access to cash and credit is a small business’s lifeline. Your business’s credit rating shows lenders, suppliers, and other vendors how financially stable your business is, as well as how well you’ve been able to manage your cash and pay your business debts on time. Establishing a strong business credit score is the first

  Running a business cost more than planned for most founders this year. A recent survey of 1,500 early-stage founders and builders from Mercury, a fintech platform that offers business and personal banking services*, found that 75% of respondents said their costs came in higher than expected — up from 66% last year. Exactly zero

  If you lead finance in a growing company, your current card may have been picked when travel was your biggest expense. Today, most of the spending runs through software subscriptions, online ads, cloud hosting, and contractor payments, and travel is just one line among many. Comparison sites usually rank cards by their sign-up bonuses

  As a controller at a growing company, you spend a disproportionate share of your close week on invoice coding. You assign general ledger (GL) accounts, cost centers, and dimensions to vendor bills that move through accounts payable (AP). The work is mechanical, but it carries real consequences for the ledger and the close. Invoice

  For controllers at mid-market companies, accounts payable goals usually become urgent when the chief financial officer (CFO) asks for evidence. Invoice cycle times and exception rates are measured inconsistently, so you may have only anecdotal evidence when leadership asks whether the function is improving. Without a standard to measure against, many process changes can

  Managing spending can feel like a breeze when you run a small business with only a handful of monthly transactions. But as your business begins to grow, you’ll likely find yourself searching for the best spend management software to help you keep things running smoothly. In a scaling company, hands-on processes — like emailing

  Every shipment has one job: get to the customer. It doesn’t matter how it gets there—whatever mode gets the job done is the right one. Most business owners aren’t trying to become shipping experts. They just want shipping to work because a shipment that doesn’t reach the customer isn’t just a logistics problem; it’s

  Reputable legal practices don’t just offer legal protection, guidance and support to their clients. They also offer a place to store privileged communications, financial data and extremely sensitive information. However, with cybercriminals targeting law firms to gain access to this data, organizations face a difficult challenge in finding the right methods of online protection.

  Nearly 9 out of 10 (87%) human resources professionals agree that organizations have a responsibility to support the workforce’s mental health needs, according to SHRM’s 2026 Mental Health Snapshot. But confidence in the ability to actually meet those needs is slipping. Currently, 62% of HR pros feel prepared to support employees’ mental health needs,

  Many sales and marketing teams sign up for customer relationship management (CRM) software with the intention of using it, but barely do. A CRM allows teams to unify contact information and view the status of each deal across their organization. Teams also have the power to automate repetitive tasks and boost selling time with

  The global cosmetics market alone is expected to reach nearly $140 billion by 2030. Whether a business is able to capitalize on this growth depends on how they respond to changing client demands. Artificial intelligence diagnostic tools and on-demand custom services are changing the way that beauty brands approach their clients. Personalization in the

  Coming from multiple layers of government and diverse agencies, startup compliance costs vary so much with industry and location that it’s hard to find comprehensive guidance, leaving entrepreneurs without legal counsel at risk of cash flow shortages before they even make their first sale. A business license ranges from $50 to $400, sometimes more

  Ask financial advisors whether their clients have noticed the AI assistant sitting in on their planning meetings, and the honest answer is no — but clients are noticing the benefits. Emotionally intelligent advisors drive nearly two times the sentiment lift of their peers (17.5% vs. 9%), according to Jump‘s 2026 Financial Advisor Insights Report.

  Customers are drowning in advertising—on phones, social media, streets, storefronts—everywhere. Standard campaigns blur together, and brands that rely on rational messaging and price alone lose in the noise. Sensory marketing changes this equation, TEAM Concept reports. By engaging sight, touch, smell, sound, and taste, brands can trigger emotional responses that drive purchasing decisions far

  Switching from an LLC to S corporation status marks an important milestone in the life cycle of a business. Most comparisons focus on one number: how much self-employment tax is saved by an S corp election. That number is real, but it is only half the equation. Based on proprietary data, this report from

  Manufacturers aren’t the only business entity that could get sued over a defective product. If you sell products in a store, shop or online, or even if you just vend occasionally at flea markets, craft fairs or pop-ups, your business could be found liable if a product you make or sell injures someone or