Nubooks: Automating Small Business Accounting with AI-Powered Precision
For most small business owners, accounting isn't just a chore—it's a significant drain on resources. While large corporations have entire departments filled with finance directors and bookkeepers, the average entrepreneur often spends 5-6 hours a month manually entering data, chasing lost receipts, and worrying about GST compliance. But what if those hours could be reclaimed with a single snapshot of a smartphone camera?
Enter Oumesh Sauba, Founder of Nubooks. A qualified accountant by trade based in London, Oumesh realized that the accounting industry was stuck in the 20th century. By leveraging AI and Machine Learning, he built a platform that brings 21st-century sophistication to the smallest enterprises. Today, Nubooks is simplifying accounting for thousands of SMBs, proving that automation isn't just for the big players.
"If I can give you five hours a month extra, what would you do with it?" Oumesh asks, highlighting the invaluable gift of time his technology provides to founders.
The Compliance Burden: Why SMBs Struggle
Compliance is the backbone of any healthy business, yet it remains the biggest hurdle for small enterprises. Oumesh explains that without the resources of a large finance department, entrepreneurs are forced to wear the "accountant hat," often leading to lost documentation and inaccurate reporting.
The Cost of Manual Bookkeeping
- 5-6 Hours: The average time an entrepreneur spends on manual bookkeeping per month.
- Invaluable Hours: Reclaiming this time allows founders to focus on core business growth rather than paperwork.
- Accuracy Risk: Manual entry is prone to human error, which can lead to compliance issues during GST or tax filings.
- Lost Receipts: Physical records are often misplaced, leading to missed expense deductions.
Nubooks erases this inefficiency by turning those 6 hours of work into just 30 minutes of automated processing. It ensures all records are in one place, accurate, and ready for regulatory scrutiny.
The Solution: AI in Your Pocket
The core of Nubooks is a powerful mobile application designed for the "snap-and-forget" generation. Instead of collecting paper receipts in a shoebox, users simply take a picture.
How Nubooks Automates the Ledger
- Data Extraction: The AI identifies the supplier name, date, amount, and GST details from any image or PDF.
- Auto-Population: Information is automatically populated into the system's P&L and Balance Sheet modules.
- Banking Integration: Users can upload bank statements to see their entire cash flow in one unified dashboard.
- Compliance Ready: The system generates GST-compliant reports, eliminating manual calculation errors.
"We avoid people going out and doing manual entry for any GST invoice," Oumesh notes. This "sophisticated" approach is a win-win, benefiting both the entrepreneur and their professional accountants, who receive clean, organized data.
The Entrepreneurial Journey: 7 Years of Testing
Despite being an accountant, Oumesh has always had a passion for technology—recalling experiments with image-search tech as far back as 2002. Nubooks wasn't an overnight success; it was the result of seven years of rigorous testing and "proof of concept" mistakes.
Funding the venture through his own accounting practice and bank loans, Oumesh focused on one critical 'P' above all others: People. "If you get the right people working within Nubooks... the product is not going to be a problem, the pricing is not going to be a problem. The people will make it happen."
— Oumesh Sauba, Founder, Nubooks
Expanding into the Indian Market
Launched recently in India, Nubooks has already scaled to over 500 users and processed thousands of invoices. Oumesh sees India as a massive, growing market that is hungry for digital transformation. He plans to compete not by building monopolies, but by offering a more sophisticated, mobile-first alternative to the "old-fashioned" desktop-bound accounting software.
His advice to fellow founders? Embrace failure. Nubooks itself had to go back to the drawing board when its first iteration had buggy mileage tracking. Instead of giving up, they viewed the failure as a positive indicator of where to improve. By combining technological sophistication with a deep understanding of local business culture, Nubooks is well on its way to simplifying the lives of entrepreneurs globally.
About the Guest
Oumesh Sauba is the Founder of Nubooks, a global AI-powered accounting platform. A qualified accountant based in London, Oumesh has over two decades of experience in the finance industry. He is also the CEO of "My T," an AI-driven bookkeeping tool for professional accountants. Oumesh is a tech-enthusiast dedicated to digitizing the accounting profession and empowering small business owners through automation and social responsibility.