Countingup Rounds Out SMB Services With Invoicing

U.K. challenger bank Countingup is adding invoicing services to its suite of offerings for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), the company announced Wednesday (Jan. 9).

The invoicing feature enables businesses using Countingup to generate and send invoices to their own clients from their smartphones, integrating the billing feature into Countingup’s existing mobile banking and accounting capabilities. In its announcement, the company noted that the feature aims to enable small business owners to conduct multiple functions — including expense management and bookkeeping — from a single platform.

“With Countingup adding invoicing to an app that already offers business banking, automated bookkeeping and the ability to capture expenses, we now become a complete financial platform for small businesses,” said Andrew Garvey, Countingup’s chief commercial officer, in the announcement.

In addition to the new invoicing feature, the bank noted that it is readying to help small business clients comply with the upcoming “Making Tax Digital” initiative in the U.K., with plans to introduce new tax-related features to its platform “over the coming months.”

Countingup raised $750,000 in 2017 from Frontline Ventures and other investors before it formally launched operations in the U.K. in early 2018. At the time, Founder Tim Fouracre pointed to the time wasted from manual bookkeeping, as well as the hidden fees of some larger financial institutions (FIs), as key pain points that small businesses face.

When the challenger bank launched, Fouracre also highlighted the struggles of sole traders in particular when it comes to managing the finances of their businesses.

“Sole traders have been neglected by the mainstream banks [that] focus on larger businesses,” he stated last January. “Often, sole traders are forced to use personal accounts because the process of setting up a business account is arduous, slow and expensive. This creates a huge headache when trying to make sense of your business finances.”