AccountsIQ, a financial management software (FMS) startup founded by a team of accountants (if accountants want to be entrepreneurs, you know startups are one thing) has raised $ 5.8 million in funding.
The Dublin-based company, which caters to medium-sized businesses that run multiple businesses, is backed by Finch Capital, the fintech-focused VC that recently launched its third fund. According to AccountsIQ, the capital injection will be used for accelerated growth and recruitment in sales and marketing, customer success and engineering to further improve the product.
AccountsIQ’s cloud-based FMS was launched in Dublin in 2008 and is designed to simplify how multi-company companies “collect, process and report” their financial results. This includes companies that expand through subsidiaries, branches, special purpose vehicles or a franchise model – and especially those that trade across different locations, currencies and jurisdictions. The idea is to fill a gap in the market that, according to AccountsIQ, exists between low-end products like Xero, Quickbooks and Sage and much higher-quality and more expensive products like Netsuite, Intacct and SAP.
“Before the cloud, it was difficult to manage the finances of companies with multiple companies, so each company had to prepare accounts and submit them centrally for review and analysis,” said Tony Connolly, co-founder of AccountsIQ. “Our cloud solution means that all companies can access at the same time and work together with headquarters or their accountants to process their own transactions. At the same time, the results can be consolidated in the group currency to enable simple central reporting and benchmarking of group-wide results at the touch of a button ”.
To enable this “one version of the truth”, AccountsIQ was designed to handle various reporting complexities such as subgroups, multi-currency revaluations, and intercompany transactions.
The software also claims to use “artificial intelligence” and an open API strategy to automatically sync bank accounts, generate electronic payments, automatically post electronic invoices, and integrate front-end systems with simple approval workflow and expense tracking via smartphones. Existing integrations include TransferMate Global Payments, TINK, BrightPay, Kefron AP, Chaser, Concur, Salesforce, and ISAMs.
To date, AccountsIQ software is used by 4,000 companies in a variety of industries, from nonprofits to banks. Clients like PwC, Linesight Global Construction Group, Asavie Technologies, GP Bullhound and Throgmorton. In general, Connolly says that the startup’s target customer is any company that has multiple entities involved and that each entity must be accounted for separately but managed centrally. With the acceleration of cross-border e-commerce and macro events like Brexit, this customer profile is obviously growing.