The company started as a software development company in year 2010 and used to develop customized ERP solutions for medium sized companies. One of their clients had offices in 3 different cities in India and they wanted an online solution to manage their financial accounting. So, the company started developing a cloud based accounting software for Indian businesses with the help of chartered accountants and finally launched ProfitBooks in September 2012. They made it so simple that even non-accountants could use it without any training.
About ProfitBooks
From their initial software development experience, they knew that there is a demand for simple accounting software as other available solutions like Tally were too complex for an average business owner. One of their co-founders – Mr. Mohnish is a chartered accountant and they used his network to test the initial version of ProfitBooks within CA community.
The company is co-owned by Harshal Katre, Worked for over 10yrs at premier banking institutions like HSBC and Barclays in different technology verticals. Currently look after Customer Support, Testing and Product Development. Mohnish Katre, Chartered Accountant having 9 years of industry experience in research and corporate finance. He looks after Finance, Staff and Partner Training, Business Development, HR, Sales. Naveen Thota, 14 years of IT industry experience mainly in enterprise technologies. Headed the technical architect team at MNCs. In-depth knowledge of server technologies. He handles Technical Development, Maintenance and Software Infrastructure
So, these people used that feedback to further evolve the product. ProfitBooks is mainly targeted at small and medium sized businesses. It mainly comes in 2 flavors – ‘Professional’ plan is for service based companies like architects, interior decorators and other independent professionals. ‘SMB’ plan is for companies that deal with inventory. Users can create beautiful invoices, track expenses, record purchases and manage customers. ProfitBooks also comes with productivity tools like tasks and project management which is not found in any other accounting application. They also noticed that businesses were using different softwares to manage payroll and CRM. With an aim to replace these multiple softwares with one powerful tool, they added Payroll in ProfitBooks and they are soon coming up with CRM.
Within one year 1000 companies registered themselves with them. Since then their Growth rate per year has been tremendous. They have clients from almost 21 countries. In early days, our biggest challenge was to convince Indian customers to pay every year for a software. They were used to one-time payment and just did not understand the subscription model. They also had a tough time to explain how their financial data is more secure on their servers than their local office computers.One thing that helped us not only in generating sales but also in shaping up the product development is FEEDBACK. They setup a feedback mechanism inside the product and added features only when customers asked for it. This delighted our customers and made ProfitBooks more relevant to the different types of businesses.
They got covered by various reputed blogs and international media and this ensured steady flow of registrations. They also participated in various trade shows which gave them an opportunity to talk to their potential buyers directly and understand their requirements. They always believed that a good product generates sales on its own. They had spent most of their resources on product development in initial days and didn’t really think of sales. Their efforts paid off as we got a lot of positive word-of-mouth publicity. Users were impressed with the simplicity of the application.
BIGGEST COMPETITORS
Their biggest competitor in India is Tally as they have a first mover advantage and a good brand recall. ProfitBooks cannot be compared directly with tally as ProfitBooks is an online accounting software and offers various advantages of cloud computing. For example, anytime anywhere access, not having to install anything or spend on maintenance, etc.
Recently, QuickBooks has entered in this space which is mainly suitable for service based businesses. ProfitBooks offers lot of inventory management features like warehouses, stock transfer, stock wastage, batch numbers and much more. ProfitBooks additionally provides Payroll processing, document management with Dropbox integration. Other unique features include Sales order management, tasks and project management.
TTP’s Take
The Cloud accounting system is a very new concept for India . In the near future this will be very useful as other accounting software’s are much more technical than this. The TTP team wishes ProfitBooks for all it’s endeavors.
