What should a small business expect from their accounting software?

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience. – Albert Einstein

Nowadays, if you own a small business, it has become an industry standard to keep your financials using QuickBooks or Quickbooks Online. So much so that they account for over 80% of the market; with the remainder being made up of numerous other small accounting software providers. There are two main reason for this: the first being that they started all the way back in 1986 and were one of the original market innovators to provide a software based accounting solution for small businesses and the second being that customers just don’t realize that they have many other options. We can't really change the fact that they started in 1986, so let's focus on the latter.

The first thing you'll realize when opening QuickBooks is the overwhelming complexity of the user experience. The design is mainly the heritage of the previous desktop versions and is far from perfect with most of the everyday activity being far from a simple click away. It is also apparent that Intuit is catering to the accountant and not the small business owner who ends up with the rigorous task of trying to understand their financials through the software.

Einstein (as quoted at the top of this post), pointed out the obvious: the supreme goal is simplicity without inadequate representation. In our opinion, this could not be more true about how an accounting software should be build. Simple enough for the everyday customer (the business owner), and powerful enough to handle the natural complexities of a small business and its financials.

There won't be many people that would argue with the statement above, nevertheless this message of keeping things simple has not yet arrived to the world of accounting software. One main reason for this is that these software solutions built a business model around the accountant that is already interacting with these businesses. They are built from the perspective of the accountant rather then the mindset of a small business user.

We at Techne take a different approach and realize that there is no reason why accounting software in today's environment can't be simple enough for any business owner to understand and use.

Techne was built with simplicity in mind for both the design and usability. By understanding the customer (the small business owner not the accountant), we approached everything with a more empathetic perspective. Every touch of design was crafted to clearly have an intimate connection with the customer. We truly understand that your business is your life and the same way you want a Doctor to tell you whether you are healthy or not instead of having to go to graduate school and study medicine yourself, we created Techne to tell you what is going on with your business without having to study accounting yourself. In order to achieve this, we stripped away all accounting terminology. Now there finally is a platform that doesn’t need the user to understand what amortizable life means. By using a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence Techne is here to give you all the knowledge of a certified public accountant spending all its time on your business.

Techne. Next generation accounting for your small business