The man waging war on Japan’s paperwork problem

Daisuke Sasaki, founder of Freee, onstage at Tech in Asia Tokyo 2016. Photo credit: Michael Holmes.

“I was working as a CFO at a startup. My team was looking after accounting. And there was a person doing accounting, inputing information all day long on his computer. I Just wanted to eliminate that task,” says Daisuke Sasaki, speaking of the origins of his startup.

So he did some research and tried out some accounting applications, but none of them really took away all the drudgery and paperwork.

At the time he wasn’t thinking about starting his own venture.

But that changed when he got a job at Google doing marketing for small businesses.

“When I joined Google I faced the same problem again.”

And that’s when he got the feeling that the kind of online services that Google builds would be super useful for businesses, bringing automation and online syncing to their piles of paperwork.

Only about 10 percent of small businesses in the country use online banking.

So he started Freee. “Even if you don’t have any accounting knowledge, it’s easy to use,” said Daisuke yesterday, speaking onstage at Tech in Asia Tokyo 2016.

Now the online service has 600,000 businesses across Japan using it to automate and save their accounting and HR, no paper needed. It also allows users to set up a new business online in just five minutes.

“We are supporting them all the way from starting the company to managing the company,” he says.

Paper mountain

Japan certainly has a paperwork problem – and it’s an issue that Daisuke is waging war against. The desire to keep everything on paper has helped keep the fax alive long after it has died out in most countries.

“Japan has this Galápagos effect of holding on to some things they’re comfortable with,” said Jonathan Coopersmith, a technology historian who has written extensively about the rise and fall of the fax machine, in 2013 to the New York Times.

AI ambitions

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