Launch HN: Swipe (YC S21) – Simple Billing and Accounting for India
We were building software and IoT for industrial automation before we started working on this. We dealt with a lot of invoices, purchase orders and estimates for different customers/vendors on a daily basis. We used to manually make invoices on spreadsheets and store them locally on our computers. Initially, it was working fine but as we got more sales it started to get difficult to manage. On top of that, we had to file monthly tax returns where we would manually consolidate our sales on spreadsheets and send them to our accountant for filing. The whole process is tedious and the existing software available to do it is riddled with accounting jargon and primarily targeted towards professional accountants.
We quickly realized that these efforts were not helping the company and that the time and energy would be better spent on talking to our customers and focusing on our product. Interestingly, we also found out that most of the ~75M SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) in India still rely on manual processes in tracking sales, purchasing inventory, cash management, tax filings, and payments—all highly inaccurate and inefficient and a huge opportunity for us to make an impact.
We launched with a simple MVP, with just the Sales module in January and recruited our first few customers. With continuous feedback from our initial customers, we quickly iterated and improved our MVP and started adding Purchases, Estimates, Expenses and Inventory modules. Now we have over 1000 businesses onboarded with us and growing.
Using Swipe, business owners can now create invoices, purchase orders and quotations in a few seconds without any accounting knowledge. Based on their sales, purchases and expenses, we automatically update inventory, payables and receivables and make it easy for them to manage accounting. We also instantly generate those awful monthly tax filings!
Thanks for reading. We would love to hear your thoughts, experiences and the time you spend on accounting and tax filing. We are live on https://getswipe.in. Please share your feedback with us.
41 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 90.0 ms ] threadAlso how much commission fee will you charge?
I have seen this model used in other large countries like Indonesia whereby the core product is provided free to merchants to juice adoption. This is of course subsidised by the VC funding. But what is the eventual monetisation plan?
Maybe this demographic of "customers" don't think about this, but if the product is free now, and later if you try to charge, what happens if you have lots of churn? And so to avoid that, revenue has to come from other methods, such as maybe selling customer data?
Would be interesting to hear your thoughts on this.
We want to make the mobile version free to use and charge them for web access currently $15 per user per year.
Also there is a transaction charge we collect on the payments made through Swipe. That's another revenue stream.
These are the 2 revenue streams we have on our mind right now :).
I experienced ordering medicines over Whatsapp for the first time from the local store in Mumbai a few weeks ago. Discussing order items and them checking drawers was a PITA, so I just called them to get it done. There often is no inventory management system - it's a manual check.
It was easy to tell that the person at the store didn't quite grasp how things worked around online payment, just that they knew how to follow instructions someone had given them.
1. Generate physical invoice manually
2. Send customer a pic of the invoice over Whatsapp to reconfirm order items and total amount
3. Send customer a pic of the physical panel w/ QR code from payment provider over Whatsapp
4. Wait for SMS from bank account confirming amount paid
5. Dispatch order
https://m.imgur.com/sssuU2e
Not quite there in terms of sending UPI "collect requests" or digital invoices, but it works! Receiving a picture of a QR code was a bit odd but you can easily get around that.
This space is definitely exciting, and you can already see the impact digital payments are having on small biz. Good luck, and change the world!
This is the pain point we are addressing.
A couple questions:
How is Swipe different from Bikayi.com (coincidentally by IIIT-H and YCombinator alumnus, just like yourself)?
And how different is Swipe to Khatabook, OKCredit and other such similar solutions? Do they not focus as much on IT (gst/tax) compliance? Where is the catch?
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The landing page has more contact us CTAs than get started, you may want to flip the ratio around?
Also, I believe embedding YouTube video on the homepage might help given trying the product requires sign-up (in addition to linking users to to your YouTube channel for tutorials).
Per my reading, WhatsApp integration is one of the differentiators, but the service lacks a mobile app? That is a strange disconnect. What isn't the landing page telling me about the integrations?
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As someone who knows many small, often home-run businesses, Swipe is definitely onto something, filling a niche that other services won't / don't. It would be interesting to watch Swipe's progress, especially since copycats are on-the-rise given never-seen-before fund raises by Indian VCs. All the best.
With the aggressive implementation of GST(Goods and Services Tax, a monthly sales compliance) in India, business owners are spending between 2-7 days per month to organize these sales for tax filings. And even managing the payments is also becoming complex for the businesses as they need to manually check who paid for what transaction.
Apps like Khatabook and OKCredit and not towards the invoicing and GST compliance, but are more used for recording the credit/debit. For micro businesses it might work as most of them don't worry about inventory and tax stuff. We are targeting the small and medium segment and making it easy for them to manage inventory, bills, customers, vendors and taxes at a single place.
We started with Desktop version as most of our initial customers use desktop for billing, and we are comfortable developing web apps. Now, mobile app is in private beta and some of our customers are already testing it. Soon in a week or so we are about to launch the native mobile app on playstore.
Thank you for the suggestions on the landing page, we will be working on them.
My comparision with Bikyai was prompted by Swipe's support for setting up an online store. And with the well-funded Khatabook (and OKCredit), because they are bound to enter invoicing and tax-compliance market eventually (if they haven't already: https://wap.business-standard.com/article/companies/fintech-...)
Also at this stage, we are not too much worried about the competition as this is a big market opportunity and we believe it is going to be much more bigger market than today in the coming couple of years. So sooner or later competition exists.
Having worked on the SMB billing and accounting space for 2 years in India - its a really really tough space to monetise profitably. The market size seems huge from the outside but its a tough nut to crack.
The space is also hyper-competitive now with khatabooks, dukaan etc spending 100s of crores with no revenue.
Its seems like what you are building is a mini-ERP for SMBs in India. If you are touching AP, AR - do you have tally integration? Pretty much every SMBs auditors will ask for it.
All the best!
We do not have any direct integration with Tally but the data can be exported as an excel file.
We are focused on solving the invoicing and payments part for now.
Would love to know more of your insights and experience from the SMB space.
How are you planning to be better than the incumbent players and are you willing to collaborate because i tried with quickbooks last time and they have essentially left the market. I lost clientele because of the sub par experience i was banking on.
Will you anything like the American Swipe? An acquirer separate from a bank can be big thing there. UPI is there for retail payments, but for everything else...
Currently we are focused only on the Indian market.
I would like to know more about what American Swipe is?
Invoicing people on paper, keeping track of all of it, and having to repeatedly call your account manager on the phone to check arrival of transfers feels so out of this world in 2021.
Sure we would love to help you with this. Lets connect on whatsapp 7989207832.