AccountsIQ scores €5.8M for its financial management software for multi-entity SMEs – TechCrunch

AccountsIQ, a financial management software (FMS) startup founded by a team of chartered accountants (when accountants want to be entrepreneurs, you know startups are a thing), has raised €5.8 million in funding.

Backing the Dublin-based company, which targets mid-sized businesses that operate multi-entities, is Finch Capital, the fintech focussed VC that recently outed its third fund. AccountsIQ says the injection of capital will be used for accelerated growth and recruitment across sales and marketing, customer success and engineering to continue to enhance the product.

Launched in 2008 in Dublin, AccountsIQ’s cloud-based FMS aims to simplify how multi-entity businesses “capture, process and report” their financial results. These include businesses that are expanding via subsidiaries, branches, SPVs or a franchise model — and specifically those that trade across different locations, currencies and jurisdictions. The idea is to plug a gap in the market that AccountsIQ says exists between low end products like Xero, Quickbooks and Sage, and much higher end and more expensive products like Netsuite, Intacct and SAP.

“Managing the finances of multi-entity businesses was difficult prior to the cloud, requiring each entity to prepare accounts and send them in centrally for review and analysis,” explains AccountsIQ co-founder Tony Connolly. “Our Cloud solution means that all entities can access simultaneously and collaborate with head office or their accountants to process their own transactions, while providing full consolidation of results in the group base currency to allow easy central reporting and benchmarking of group wide results at the touch of a button”.

To enable this “one version of the truth,” AccountsIQ has been designed to be able to handle various reporting complexities, such as sub-groups, multiple currencies revaluations, and inter-company transactions.

The software also claims to employ “artificial intelligence” and an open API strategy to automatically synchronise bank accounts, generate electronic payments, auto-post electronic invoices and integrate front-end systems with easy approval workflow and expense capture via smartphones. Existing integrations include ​TransferMate Global Payments​, TINK, BrightPay, Kefron AP, ​Chaser, Concur​, ​Salesforce​ and ​ISAMs​.

To date, the AccountsIQ software is used by 4,000 companies across various industries, from non-profits to banks, with clients such as PwC, Linesight Global Construction Group, Asavie Technologies, GP Bullhound and Throgmorton. Broadly speaking, Connolly says the startup’s target customer is any business where multi-entities are involved, and that require each entity to be accounted for separately but managed centrally. With the acceleration of cross-border e-commerce and macro events like Brexit, that customer profile is evidently expanding.