Accounting has traditionally been an unglamorous, under-served backwater of the software industry, but FreeAgent and it’s team are completely reinventing this category.
FreeAgent helps customers take care of their business admin day-to-day – from managing expenses, running a fully RTI-compliant payroll and tracking the time you’re working, through to creating and sending professional-looking estimates and invoices to your clients.
FreeAgent has set out to “democratise accounting” and over the last eight years has grown from 3 to 70 employees and attracted some 40,000 customers and numerous industry awards along the way.
In May the company embarked on its first crowdfunding campaign – aimed at raising £1m to help accelerate its growth and product development, and to make it easy for its customers to invest in FreeAgent. Two weeks in they are half way to achieving the target.
FreeAgent CEO Ed Molyneux and his two co-founders Olly Headey and Roan Lavery recognised when they set up the company that there was nothing available for freelancers and micro-businesses to manage their accounts. Instead, these types of business owners tended to have to use inflexible spreadsheets or complicated, complex desktop software that wasn’t right for their specific needs.
Therefore, FreeAgent was designed specifically for this core market of freelancers and micro-businesses – making it unique from other accounting software packages.
FreeAgent has quickly become a multi-award winning online accounting system since starting up in 2007. Specifically designed for freelancers and micro businesses, more than 40,000 customers currently use the software to manage their business accounts and day-to-day bookkeeping, all without confusing accounting jargon and with a friendly support team to help them stay on track.
The runner up of this months competition was Flubit.com, an online marketplace where offers and deals are unique to each user to avoid spam messages. Flubit has created a unique ecommerce model that’s not only benefitting customers by creating cheaper offers but the Flubit model also allows retailers and merchants to win back sales they would have lost otherwise resulting in increased revenue. Flubit.com now has a loyal and dedicated base of users which is growing by the day.
