Ledgerly

The founder had spent a year doing her own bookkeeping across a spreadsheet, a receipt-scanning app and a bank export. Her accountant charged extra every quarter to untangle it. She had talked to enough other freelancers to know the problem was common, and had a clear picture of what the product should do, but no technical co-founder and a budget that ruled out the agencies she'd already spoken to.

She needed something real enough to charge for, soon enough to test the idea before her own savings ran out.

We started with the thing the accountant actually needed: a quarter-end pack with categorised income and spend, VAT worked out, and receipts attached. Everything else was scoped around producing that pack with as little manual effort as possible.

• Bank feeds via Open Banking, with a rules engine that learns categories from the user's corrections.
• A receipt inbox: forward an email or take a photo, and it's matched against the transaction.
• A quarter-end export in the format her accountant used, plus a plain PDF for everyone else.
• A small iOS app for capturing receipts on the move, sharing the same backend.

We cut two features from the original list, invoicing and mileage, because they would have added three weeks and nobody in the early interviews had asked for them. Both were added later, once there was revenue to pay for them.

Live in seven weeks. 1,200 paying users within six months.

Ledgerly launched with a waiting list of forty people and passed a thousand paying customers eighteen months later, still on the codebase we handed over. The company has since hired one in-house engineer, who we helped interview, and we still pick up occasional pieces of work when they need a second pair of hands.