Fintech Friday: Clear Books

Ruth Fouracre, CEO of Clear Books, spoke with Efma’s Boris Plantier about her company’s convenient solution for small businesses in the UK.

What led to the creation of Clear Books?

Clear Books is a bookkeeping tool for small businesses that’s easy-to-use. We created Clear Books because we recognized that small businesses often struggle with business administration like keeping track of what customers owe them, what they owe suppliers, or filing their tax returns. They need an online accounting software that is easy and fast.

There are millions of passionate small business people working hard to provide goods or services. The team at Clear Books pride themselves on helping business owners take care of business admin and build more successful businesses. Ten years ago, all accounting software was desktop based, installed on a computer in an office. Our idea to launch online accounting software meant it was easier for small businesses to access their financial data anywhere at any time.

Could you present Clear Books' offer?

Clear Books is the easy-to-use bookkeeping tool for a small business looking for an ‘out of the box’, no-jargon tool to help them run their business. Clear Books is rated 4.6/5 on TrustPilot and has a fantastic support team at the end of the phone for anyone who needs that extra helping hand carrying out their bookkeeping. Our simple, easy-to-understand interface empowers small businesses to better understand and manage their finances.

Clear Books is designed specifically for small UK businesses enabling them to become more confident in their business finances by allowing them to:
- Create & send professional invoices
- Keep track of bills - what’s paid and pending
- View business bank balances, matching the payments to invoices and bills
- Complete tax returns, submitting them directly to HMRC
- View automatic financial reports about the business

What's coming next for Clear Books?

Online technology has never been more crucial to a business’s ability to trade. For a business and its advisors to be able to access financial information, anywhere, and at any time, is more important now than ever.

However, businesses don’t want to use their key software tools (online banking and accounting software) in a silo. They want them to work together in a seamless, easy-to-use, way. Clear Books recognizes that alongside their accounting software, a business’s number one key tool is its online banking. That’s why we are focusing on partnering with banks to connect accounting and banking in a more joined up, easier-to-use way.

With over 12 years of experience in building accounting software, and with a tried and tested solution on the market, Clear Books makes the perfect partner for banks. We are a small, nimble business that can deliver solutions much more quickly than a traditional bank can. And we have experience in tailoring our solution to what each bank and its customers need - whether that’s our entire solution, or a subset of tools.

We’re really excited to continue developing our current banking partnerships as well as entering into new ones to continue to make it even easier for small businesses to understand and manage their finances.

With the UK Government continuing to digitize the tax regime (Making Tax Digital), small UK businesses who will be mandated to switch to digital solutions are going to find that transition difficult unless there’s an easy-to-understand and easy-to-use solution on the market - that’s where Clear Books comes in.