Pandle Bookkeeping

Software Development for Accounting

The Client

The Accountancy Partnership (TAP) is an online accountancy firm that specialises in managing the tax affairs of small-to-medium sized businesses throughout the UK.

The Project

TAP discovered that some of the simplest of bookkeeping tasks were being made highly complex and time-consuming, rife with mistakes brought about by onerous accounting software.

Dealing with smaller businesses, TAP found that the financial records submitted by their clients were of a basic format – typically a whole list of figures stored on a disorganised spreadsheet or notepad. This often resulted in exhausting periods of administration, subsequently costing their clients a lot of money.

Their business users often couldn’t justify huge investment in comprehensive bookkeeping products like Sage Line 50, nor did they have the in-house expertise to use them.

As a result, Yozu was approached by TAP to build a redesigned bookkeeping product that was geared solely towards small business owners who were typically inexperienced bookkeepers.

Prior to this project, Yozu’s main body of work focused on Logistics, CRM, E-Commerce, and Payment Portals, however, drawing on our decades of experience and following a two-week consultation, we gathered detailed requirements and drafted a high-level specification that outlined our proposed solution.

The deliverables requested were challenging; they required a clean yet innovative application that made bookkeeping simple, which has made Pandle the go-to application for any SMB with little to no accounting experience.

The final product would be a web-based application hosted in the cloud, and a firm emphasis would be placed on maintaining a clear and concise interface (less is more!).

The application would be developed using the Ruby on Rails tech stack and be both scalable and portable across different cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

The Results

The entire product was designed, developed, and tested in less than a year and is now deployed and marketed online as Pandle. With over 1000 users subscribed within the first three months, the feedback from customers has been the motivation to build bigger and better features within the product.

Stepping up to the challenge, our team managed to deliver:

• Full multi-user support: different members of staff within a company can register and have access to their company’s financial data through their own login. They are also able to grant access to their own accountant in order to extract information to use with their end-of-year tax returns
• Sales invoice generation: in addition to the batch invoicing support, we also allow users to produce and send Sales Invoices as PDFs
• Flexible financial years: a user can set their financial year start and end date ‘on-the-fly’, allowing them to look back to previous years’ data at the click of a button
• White labeling: the product can be branded for use by other accountancy firms

TAP now benefits from having a unique selling point when offering their accountancy services – their very own cloud-based bookkeeping package. All of TAP’s clients are encouraged to use the software for free, annually saving hundreds of hours of work processing client records.

Whilst the product was intended to be solely for use by their own clients, thanks to the modular and flexible approach we took to development we were able to add in multi-company support in a matter of days.