Zervant Raises €1.3M to Provide Automated Accounting for Micro Businesses


    Our civilisation has reached unbelievable technological advances. We can make things fly at Mach 20, reach absolute oceanic depths, create clones from single drops of blood but for all of those advances we still can’t fully automate accounting. Well, at least not in this part of the world.

    Today, the finnish company Zervant, raised €1.3 million from TEKES Young Innovative Companies program and private investors to aid in humanity’s search for the simplest way to do accounting. They currently focus on micro-sized businesses and sole-entrepreneurs and have already gathered over 11 000 of them from 125 countries as their customers.

    The service basically allows you to track your work and sales on the go, on any device and automatically generate invoices and all the required accounting that goes with it.

    Tuukka Koskinen the COO of Zervant tells us that in comparison to say Freshbooks, their “keypoint is that [they] are concentrating on the European markets and have all the VAT settings already set-up with the local invoicing. For example in different countries, there are different systems. In Finland [there is] the bar code and in France you pay by cheque and so on.”

    Koskinen also commented that “[Zervant is] actually giving sole-entrepreneurs a possibility to do their accounting so that it fulfils the legal requirements in those countries where [it] are operating in.”

    So for all intents and purposes, they have automated accounting at least for those single entrepreneurs. This is definitely a step in the right direction as most of the currently available accounting software solutions are simply horrible.

    For instance, Netvisor, the awful accounting software we use, requires 4 clicks just to say “Yes, the invoice is correct, send it already.” In fact, I should refrain from further comments about Netvisor as things might turn nasty very quickly.

    Seriously though, it should not be all that hard to fix accounting, its not e-mail or rocket science. You have all the numbers and all you need to do is to make it super easy to input them and then output them in the correct way and send it to the government. Please, somebody, do it already.

    The CEO, Mattias Hansson tells us that the company is “growing with 1000 companies a month and international sales has tripled in the first half of 2013, which is amazing as we do not have any dedicated sales people onboard”.

    At least this shows that Zervant is on the right path and it looks like it is appreciated by their clients, with over 90% renewal rate and excellent growth statistics.

    Header Image Courtesy of Shutterstock // Accounting