Khatabook’s objective is simple. It wants to increase efficiency and profitability for MSMEs through its digital solutions. To fulfil this goal, it is addressing problems related to business financial management and access to credit through its tech platforms.

Back in January 2019, the company started out with digitising the bahi khatas, a red accounting notebook that every business owner in India keeps to maintain daily Jama (credit) and udhar (debit). Automating bahi khatas resulted in real-time visibility in finance, efficient cashflows, fast pending payment collections, and reduced accounting errors or missing data for MSMEs delivering an immediate impact on business efficiency and profitability, claims the startup.

“Access to short-term credit is another area that has a direct impact on business efficiency. Hence, we have now introduced MSME lending on our App. Currently, we are offering small-mid ticket size loans ranging from INR 50K-2L with tenure up to 12 months to the users of the Khatabook app for efficiently managing their cash flows, helping them with their working capital needs, purchasing inventories, etc,” says Ravish Naresh, CEO and co-founder, Khatabook.

Khatabook provides accounting software and financial services through two products, namely, BizAnalyst and Khatabook. Khatabook is a mobile-first accounting solution for retailers and BizAnalyst is an accounting software focussed towards distributors and traders.

We have a strong focus on hiring software engineers who can go above and beyond to understand our users’ perspective and build the right products that work flawlessly.

The company is currently at annualized gross revenue of INR 70 Cr and is expecting to reach the profitability milestone in the next 18-24 months. “The basic bookkeeping tools will remain free for users to leverage while our revenue will come from scaling FinServe / Digital Lending offerings along with increasing the subscriber base for our paid SaaS service offerings on the platform. This product strategy will enable us to scale our monetization efforts while maintaining user stickiness,” he says. The company is currently focused on scaling up digital lending with a plan to touch an AUM of more than INR 500 Cr in the next 12 months.

Resilience and agility are two very important lessons that the co-founder has learnt and would share with budding entrepreneurs in the space. “Hire people who are attitudinally resilient and agile and build an organisation whose culture reflects resilience and agility as core values. There are going to be times when you are experiencing hyper-growth and there are going to be times when things will slow down. In both scenarios, it is important to adopt and keep moving,” he says.

FACTSHEET

• Total funding raised so far: $180 Mn
• Year of inception: January 2019
• Key investors: Sequoia, DST, B-Capital, Tribe Capital
• Number of employees: 320
• Number of customers: 10 Mn MAUs, 150k+ paid users for Biz Analyst