Facing Accounting Dragons
It was late 2018. I had just started working as a lead accountant for a reputable business on St. Maarten. On the surface everything seemed great! The business had a beautiful office, great people and provided good pay and benefits.
However, less than two weeks into my new job, I began to discover that “accounting dragons” lurked in the shadows. The business was several years behind on its yearly financial reporting, made use of in-efficient bookkeeping processes and had an overwhelmed accounting team. To make matters worse, the accounting dragons were a lot scarier than I originally thought! You see, my employer belonged to a group of companies and was responsible not only for its own accounting. It was responsible for the accounting of all other companies in the group as well. If this was a scary story being told around a campfire, kids would be screaming right about now!
Faced with these monstrous challenges (pun intended), I started thinking about how technology could be used to improve the situation. For one, I noticed that the junior accountants spent a lot of time manually entering bank transactions into QuickBooks Online; the accounting program used by the business. After doing some research, I discovered that QuickBooks Online and other popular accounting applications use bank feeds. These bank feeds allow a business to connect their bank account to their accounting application. Each day the bank feed would automatically pull the latest bank account transactions into the accounting application. This saves a tremendous amount of time compared with manual data entry!
At last! I had discovered the sword that would slay the accounting dragons! Unfortunately that was not the case. QuickBooks Online bank feeds do not connect with most local banks operating in St Maarten and the wider Caribbean. The only alternative solution that QuickBooks Online allowed for was for bank transactions to be manually uploaded in a digital file. I guess facing accounting dragons with a pocket knife is better than approaching empty handed? In the end I would not face these dragons any longer; or so I thought! I left my employer to focus on starting an accounting firm called Tact.
More Bookkeeping Automation
Let’s fast forward the story to late 2019. At this point, I had been running Tact for about 1 year. The company consisted of myself, 1 employee and a handful of clients based in the Caribbean Netherlands. This region consists of the Caribbean islands Bonaire, St Eustatius and Saba. Having narrowly escaped the accounting dragons at my last job, I decided to make use of QuickBooks Online and upload bank transactions to the application in-order to save time.
The only annoying thing is that clients have to download and send their bank transactions to Tact each month. For entrepreneurs and small business owners with limited time, every administrative task is a task too much! For most accounting firms like Tact, having to repeatedly chase clients for information is “a pain in the rear” of the profession. Additionally, as Tact and its clients began to grow, the number of transactions to book each month steadily increased. This meant that it took longer and longer to prepare each client’s monthly reports.
I quickly realised that Tact would struggle to scale if I did not deal with these growing bottlenecks or “little accounting dragons”. If not properly dealt with, they would eventually turn into the fully grown dragons I came across at my last job! To prevent this from happening I realised the need for more bookkeeping automation. Conducting further research, I came across TwinField. This appeared to be the only accounting application in the Caribbean that offered direct integration with local St. Maarten banks. Tact switched from QuickBooks Online to TwinField in early 2020. With TwinField the majority of our clients’ bank transactions are automatically sent daily to the accounting system saving time and reducing errors. So Tact and its clients lived happily ever after right? Not quite!
Over the next few months and years I quickly realised that TwinField, although great in its own right, is not the ideal accounting software for every type of business or accounting firm. As a result of the pandemic, I observed a rapid increase in the digitisation of business in the BES Islands and the wider Caribbean region. Entrepreneurs and businesses were increasingly adopting online accounting applications like QuickBooks Online, Xero and Exact to name a few. However there existed no solution to connect their local bank accounts to these accounting applications. At this point, I was certain that a brand new solution needed to be built.
From Prototype to Startup
Let’s jump ahead to early 2021. At this point Roy Brouwer and I had been friends for a number of years. Roy by chance happened to be a full stack software engineer by profession. Anyways, one day Roy and I met up for dinner. I started sharing with him the idea of building “an open banking solution” for the Caribbean. This solution would allow entrepreneurs and businesses in the region to connect their local bank accounts with popular accounting applications. From my perspective, Roy was not entirely impressed with the idea initially. However with a little bit of persistence and nagging, I finally convinced him to start coding a solution.
By mid 2021, Roy had built an initial prototype of Tactly’s app. At this stage the application only worked with TwinField; the accounting application being used by Tact. I had decided to use my own accounting firm Tact to test Tactly’s prototype. This in part inspired the name Tactly which stands for Tact technology. Anyways, over the next several months both Roy and I worked together to fix bugs, refine and improve Tactly’s application. This process greatly helped in making the app’s performance more solid and reliable. Shortly afterwards, I felt comfortable enough to start approaching new potential customers like the Golden Rock Resort.
The Golden Rock Resort is a 5 star resort on the beautiful island of St Eustatius. I had previously done some consulting work for the resort via Tact and had kept in touch. I learnt that the Golden Rock Resort had to process a high volume of transactions in its accounting system. Tactly worked closely with the resort to integrate our solution with their accounting system. The Golden Rock became Tactly’s second customer (after Tact) and continues to enjoy the benefits of data entry automation.
The above experiences inspired Roy and I to launch Tactly as a startup tech firm. We believe that many more entrepreneurs and businesses in the Caribbean can benefit from the accounting automation Tactly delivers; and that this can play a role in unlocking the financial potential of the region. Currently we are developing Tactly to work with even more accounting applications and local banks. Stay tuned to this blog to learn more! You can also contact us at [email protected] if you want to discuss integrating Tactly with your own accounting system.