Why on earth would we do this?

Go all the way back to the beginning and create something from scratch… All the pain of hiring and branding and finding offices and raising capital and prioritising product and integrating applications and coordinating support and billing and payments and accounting and board reports and enduring sleepless nights. Why?

Because we love it.

We love building software. We love creating value. We love making a difference. We love to make a positive impact. We love building great teams. We love improving the lives of our customers and the thrill of fast growth. We love the opportunities in an industry whose competitive landscape is dominated by old and stodgy players, many of which have been around for 20+ years.

We love a challenge.

The accounting industry is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Rod Drury and the team at Xero, and subsequently Intuit with their Quickbooks Online offering, have accelerated the transition from desktop-based general ledger to cloud-based single or common ledger. The way in which accountants and their clients interact has dramatically changed. The path towards automation of compliance has begun and the array of products and services that accountants can offer their clients has increased enormously.

From retail point of sale systems to inventory, property, legal, hiring and leasing, thousands of applications have been born over the last 7 or 8 years that cater for the millions of businesses that are now conducting their accounting in the cloud. These applications integrate and move data and money, providing increasing value for their clients.

Nearly every type of business has been catered for, except for the very person whose livelihood is in the eye of this storm. The humble accountant!

There’s not a single application that caters for their day to day needs. A place where they can collaborate with their team and look after their clients. Something that brings all their clients’ general ledgers, regardless of vendor, into one place. Where email, meeting notes, phone calls and checklists related to each client are visible to all relevant people in the firm. Where documents, client and tax information can be stored in a single, accessible, searchable location so when a new job or project commences there’s not a morning’s worth of work just to bring everything together.

And in the US, tax accountants still can’t go from books to tax to filing in one application. The transposition of numbers through Excel multiple times is extraordinary. It’s madness!

We’re setting out to solve this. To become the one place where everything you’d expect to be available is at your finger tips. And it’s not just about utilisation and realisation but increasing the enjoyment of work too. Ultimately leaving firms more profitable and allowing accountants a little more family time.