New startup saves small business from drowning in invoices

Photo credit: ladybugkreativ.

There are about 40 million small and medium businesses in India – or more, depending on who you ask.

And then there are smaller businesses still – startups that have just sprung up, or old businesses that have just always enjoyed being the neighborhood bodega.

What is common to most of them?

That they are drowning under the paper trail from tracking their finances, according to Ashwani Rathore, chief executive and co-founder of Pune-based SpiderG, an e-invoicing app.

“Entrepreneurs need to keep a tab on everyday deals, they require a management information system report to track all transactions, and even need to keep track of all business related conversations for updates and follow-ups. Most of that is now done manually,” he said.

Spending a lot of time and energy over making invoices, manually uploading them on the company system, and following up on payments and deals sounds like a massive waste of time, but for small businesses that don’t have a lot money to throw at the problem, there is no other option. Ashwani and team realised this, and decided to fill the gap.

The team launched an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software two years ago to help small businesses, but soon realized they had read the situation all wrong.

“We realized it was not solving any real problems for SMEs. ERPs bring efficiency in a company, but when someone is just starting out, it is not about bringing efficiency. It is about solving working capital issues and dealing with vendors and customers,” Ashwani told Tech in Asia.

That led to some rethinking. After six months of research, SpiderG was born.

“What Facebook has done is, it has digitized your social interaction. We are digitizing the way two companies interact,” Ashwani said.

In simple words, it is an app that will do away with your company’s needs to manually upload, approve, and follow up every bit of financing and payment related paperwork by syncing it with your Tally system, the ubiquitous enterprise software for small businesses in the country. If you don’t use any, you can still generate invoices right in the app to digitize all your paperwork.

Ashwani Rathore, CEO and Co-founder of SpiderG. Photo credit: SpiderG.

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