The trigger that challanged us to create Accounting as a Service

When we started our project regarding accounting service we said that we can do it better than the image in the header – we started an accounting firm. During the start, we asked ourselves how we should manage Small Businesses with same efficiency as the large or very large company.

Is it possible to manage thousands and thousands of business events per day for a large number of small companies with high efficiency?

And at same time have a market offer based on a business model that meet customer requirement like full control, a good price and simplicity.

So we started to develop Accounting as a Service and the answer is yes, it’s possible and we are there now.

We saw that the key to make it happen was to have a system that manages all business documents like business events are managed in a large company. A large company has a system that is tailored to their needs and the accounts are created more or less automatic. Large companies has an accounting department and a CFO that manages the financial flow.

So, we did it! We created our own system tailored to our needs and more important, tailored to our customer needs. The system includes an automatic workflow where all documents are treated in one seamless process and totally paperless. We have been able to cut the process cost with over 50% and the self-learning accounting robot would increase the cost cutting even more over time. It gives us the opportunity to give advice like a CFO.

Now, if I link back to the trigger. When we saw the result of a digitized accounting system and combined with a new approach for customer to follow the accounting service, we got a number of ideas. For example, could we improve customer understanding? Our customer base includes very small companies with business owners that more or less dislike accounting and are not interested in numbers. Fancy diagram and numbers tells them nothing – they are not interested. But they understand that they need to know and especially when we give the advice to cut cost.

So we now start the work to add a ledger visualizer!

And we have now added “Easy to understand” to our list of focus - I have no explanation why we didn't add it to focus list in the beginning. Maybe it was the same mental barrier that most accountants have about how an accounting system should look like. Maybe the mental barrier also is the reason why accounting process of today has not fundamentally changed since the time before computers.