RealBooks is a revolutionary cloud based accounting software designed to act as a command centre for running the entire business on fingertips. Established under its parent company Adansa Solutions Pvt. Ltd., RealBooks was launched with an underlying desire to simplify the finance & accounting for startups, renowned businesses and accountants. It is currently serving clients in financial and accounting space in cities like Delhi Bangalore, Mumbai and Kolkata.
Sujata Sangwan interacts with Anurag Mohta, Co-Founder, RealBooks and spoke to him
How did the entrepreneurial bug bite you?I was trading mortgages as part of the Real Estate team with Deutsche Bank in London when an opportunity arose with the real estate private equity desk within Deutsche in Mumbai. I was quite keen to move back and so took the offer to shift to Mumbai. As luck would have it, this coincided with the global downturn and through 2008-2010 were the worst years to be in banking. We were going to work without really having any work to do, no funds to invest etc. etc. That’s when I started thinking of possible alternatives and assessing gaps in the market for products and services.
When was your startup founded and who are the co-founders?We founded Adansa Solutions in 2011. Neeraj Jain, a childhood friend of mine and a third generation Chartered Accountant wasn’t really keen on working in his family firm and I was also looking for opportunities to start a venture. After a reasonable amount of brainstorming, we ventured into the accounting outsourcing space.
Prior to this, I did start an online children’s library – Kolkata’s first and we opened up branches in Ranchi and Bangalore, but while it was doing fine, I did not really find the model to be scalable, so we wound it up in 2013.
It was a great learning, as I realised that for every business, to be successful, you must carefully analyse how scalable the business is.
What is your Product or Services/Offerings to Customer? How does your startup work?We started out as a pure services company – with an aim to provide quality accounting outsourcing services to domestic clients. While there was nothing really novel in this concept, we were trying to up and improve the service quality compared to our peers. While globally F&A Outsourcing is a multi-billion dollar industry, in India, traditionally this space is extremely fragmented and disorganized and dominated by Chartered Accountants who provide accounting services to their clients as a quarterly/annual activity, more from a compliance perspective. Additionally, there are freelancers who visit multiple clients over the course of the week and do data-entry work. All of this was being done just to ensure banking/compliance was somehow kept up-to date.
We got into this, to actually help management take better decisions using the information at hand. Based on our experience with our first few clients, we realised that to provide quality outsourcing services, we need better technology available in the accounting domain.
Simple questions needed to be answered – a. How do you know your person visiting the client site is not wasting his time there? b. How do you know the actual accounting entry passed in the software is correct? c. How do you check if all compliances have been dealt with appropriately?
After 6 month of struggling to answer the “How do you know”, we ventured into building RealBooks – it is a full-fledged accounting-inventory-payroll platform which has been designed keeping the outsourcing customer in mind. While it is catering to the regular customer who needs cloud based accounting software, it has several key and unique features which greatly enhance the ability for a service provider to provide very high quality outsourcing services.
What were the challenges your startup faced while setting up?While setting up our Accounting Outsourcing vertical, we found it really difficult to provide quality services using the existing software in the market. We ventured into creating RealBooks to overcome that challenge – and have been very successful in doing this.
Developing RealBooks had its own set of challenges – we were both non-techies to start with – one a CA and myself an MBA from IIM Lucknow. But overcoming the odds, we became self-learnt techies and hired a team under us to develop the entire platform and continuously keep developing it further. It took us a while to build the platform but now it’s’ ready and the biggest challenge we are currently facing is with respect to marketing this across the country, as we are both traditionally finance and operations guys and do not really understand marketing and branding.
Who are your competitors?Since we have two distinct verticals – the competitors are different in each:
For RealBooks our competitors are the likes of QuickBooks, Tally, Busy, Ace and mid-sized ERPs. In reality, from a software standpoint we don’t really view them as competitors since we are a strong cloud-based multi user multi-location platform which can be used by the really small clients as well as large corporates with more than 50-100 locations and concurrent users.
We differentiate ourselves from the likes of Tally etc. with our strong dashboard features, multi-level approvals, document management, etc. and from the ERPs in the fact our software while being excellent at multi-user, multi-location and branch accounting, does not need any servers to be maintained or an IT team to be available on site for managing the ERP platform.
How is your business model different from the existing ones?While it may seem that the space we have entered is quite crowded, but the reality is that our methodology in providing these services is quite path breaking.
The biggest disruption we have brought to the Accounting Outsourcing is that we have bundled the service using technology and a process oriented approach. When we take on assignments, we understand the reporting needs of the clients, structure and configure RealBooks accordingly – maybe even customize it where required, to deliver optimum results to the client consistently.
In fact the methodology and level of services we are providing, I have not come across any other service provider doing the same – in most places, the service providers are literally just taking care of compliance, whereas the management is maintaining all MIS on excel files. At the places we provide services, excel files are an output document generated from our software, not an input for maintaining MIS records.
Who are your clients? How do you look at expansion?Our clients are sector agnostic – we are catering to clients across manufacturing (garments, iron & steel, ferro alloys, etc.), services (insurance, salons, education, man-power services) and retail. We are constantly scouting for clients in sectors where we are already providing services, as the knowledge of that sector really helps us in providing value to our clients.
What are the traction details?A lot of small and mid-sized businesses in India are not very comfortable with the idea of outsourcing accounts for a variety of reasons. Whichever companies we do accounting for, we are clear that we want to maintain clean and compliant accounting. So connecting and closing clients, takes a bit of time, in the segment we are operating – but with our services, we have got several recommendations and that has helped us constantly add clients to our client base.
We now want to jump to the next level of maintaining accounts for the private equity funds and Indian subsidiaries of foreign companies, etc.
What is the funding status and how do you monetize?We were funded with about $0.5 million which is being used up towards the development of the product. Our outsourcing division is profitable and is constantly generating revenues and cash flows.
The best and worst memories while setting upSetting up a venture is journey and there will be lots of moments that you cherish over time – but I think there are some moments that stand out:
Best Memory: Getting our first client on-board onto RealBooks, moving the client across from Tally and seeing the entire process move smoothly. We still have that client after 4 years and that is validation of our services and our RealBooks software.
Worst Memory: While even the painful memories are more like learning experiences, we had a time initially, while coding where in our Balance Sheet would not tally – while on paper it seemed so obvious, that every balance sheet must tally, the coding was somehow not proper – it took us almost 3 days to find out the error – though it was quite a simple coding error! Was kind of nightmarish
What is the market size and market opportunity?The size and market opportunity for both our verticals is quite established:
With the advent of GST, accounting will become even cleaner, and I feel that more and more companies – specially the younger generation – wants to become compliant and become more professionally managed. Trying to always save taxes by manipulation is not only dangerous but seriously limits your ability to grow – might as well pay full taxes and have unlimited growth. Hence, we find more and more companies willing to outsource their accounts – get informative reports, timely compliance etc.
Cloud based accounting is definitely the way forward – RealBooks has an edge, that it is an Amazon hosted secure platform with a mobile app as well. Small businesses who need access to accounts anywhere anytime can use RealBooks with information easily available. A single user is free. For companies with multiple locations as well, we have very strong inter-branch accounting and individual accounting with permissions, access restrictions, order-to-pay and order-to-receive cycles, payroll management and other features which you would need in a comprehensive ERP implementation. All this without any upfront cost and no headache of maintaining any servers or an IT team – it’s definitely a win-win situation.
