With over 9,000 licensed accounting firms in Nigeria, there is a unique financial problem for SMEs in terms accessing accounting services due to a number of reasons,namely the charges are calculated per hour and are usually high. Most firms cannot afford the use of modern technology and are stuck to using manual methods of operation or Excel-based.
The current accounting firms were not designed to work for small businesses because they did not understand their needs, they had long proposals for several pages and they didn’t help the SME improve it process and didn’t offer any tools to help business owners, they usually walk in take the records and do the numbers.
This triggered Ifeanyi-Eze thinking cap and she decided to solve this problem with her virtual startup AccountingHub, launched in January 2016. AccountingHub brings together a collection of accountants and consultants to offer quality accounting services to Nigerian SMEs.
Her idea is quite brilliant ; offering an online and retail shop selling professional accounting services. It brings together a collection of brilliant accountants and consultants offering quality accounting services to Nigerian SMEs. Born out of the need to grow healthier Nigerian businesses, it offers an extremely new, affordable, fast and easy access to accounting and business financial consulting tasks. We are passionate about small business. Our goal is to connect small business owners like you with talented, trusted accounting and tax professionals for the most amazing cost and experience.
Totally self-funded thus far, but seeking an investor that can help with more than just cash, AccountingHub has already worked with more than 200 small businesses of all kinds.
She welcomes a certain kind of investor, one who is willing to transform AccountingHub into a full-tech startup, helping them build the required tools and reach out to more market as the startup can only serve one in every six clients who reach out. She says, “Clearly, we need technological help to do more and it is a peculiar business which requires an investor who is willing to give more help than more money.”
The business is unique because with no money spent on any sort of marketing the profits are very healthy.
“Nigeria lacks very good accountants, especially those who blend accounting with technology. We have had to train young graduates from scratch. They come out of school with very poor appreciation of the accounting principles which they should know,”Ifeanyi-Eze says.
“So besides teaching them to use tech tools, you now have to teach basic accounting principles, like deprecation and financial statements. Talents was and is still the biggest challenge.”
