Online Bookkeeping Service Gets $2 Million in Funding

Campbell, Calif. (Feb. 10, 2009)

By Michael Cohn

Outright.com, an online bookkeeping service aimed at self-employed small businesses, has snagged $2 million in seed funding.

The financing was led by two venture capital firms, First Round Capital and Shasta Ventures, with participation from Jeff Clavier of Softech VC and several angel investors. The company, formerly known as GoBootstrap.com, has been working in “stealth mode” prior to the funding announcement, but meanwhile has been signing up a variety of small business customers who have been trying out the system.

“We’re targeting millions of small businesses that are too small even for QuickBooks,” said Outright.com co-founder and CEO Kevin Reeth, who spent nine years working for Intuit. “When you look at the landscape of small businesses, there are 20 million of 27 million that have no employees, just one person filling out a Schedule C.” The other co-founder, Ben Curren, also worked for Intuit in its QuickBooks unit.

Reeth (pictured) contends that many small business accounting packages are too complex for many self-employed business people to use. “Their businesses are so small, they don’t even describe themselves as business owners,” he said. “They say, ‘I’m self-employed, I work for myself,” but they have tracking requirements like larger companies.”

The Web-based system allows users to keep track of business income, invoices and payments, and see a breakdown of income and expenses by category. Users receive reminders of quarterly tax deadlines, and contractors and freelancers can stay on top of their 1099 forms. The system calculates quarterly tax estimates, including self-employment taxes, and allows users to export the information to a spreadsheet. The software can also generate a Schedule C in a PDF file.

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A Bookkeeper Can Boost Bookkeeping Services by Networking

Increase the home bookkeeping services by netwroking, a crucial element for bookkeepers wishing to build a clientele of quality bookkeeping clients.

Networking The Bookkeeping Services

Establishing personal relationships with individuals and groups is undoubtedly the major area to build the client base. Businesses requiring accounting and bookkeeping services have a strong tendency to remain with their existing service providers which makes new start up businesses a prime target area.

The doors can open by contacting business link, discussing the services offered with a business link advisor and obtaining details of all enterprise groups and organisations within the desired business area. Personal contact is important, each organisation should be visited in person, regular contact maintained and where possible the opportunity to join local business groups taken up. Many members of start up groups have little or no experience of bookkeeping offering an ideal opportunity.

Obtain details and attend locally held business link seminars and conferences. Contact HMRC to attend a full range of seminars on all relevant subjects such as self employment, tax and payroll to both improve knowledge and establish contact with start up businesses.

Contact with professional accounting firms and fellow bookkeepers works best when the relationship is personal and two way. Sending unsolicited application forms may be largely ignored while telephone contact and arranging a meeting works better. At those meetings the target being to both present the application form stating qualifications and experience and also discuss providing the accounting firm with additional business by offering them new clients for advanced accounting, tax and technical issues from the bookkeepers existing clients.

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