Please welcome Bookkeep, the easy way for SMBs to track revenue and reconcile payments
Meet Bookkeep, the latest addition to Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio.
HQ: Brooklyn, NY
Founders: Ruth Ku and Jason Richelson
The problem: Today, SMBs must diversify their revenue streams to be where their customers shop. A typical multi-channel approach includes e-commerce sales online, point of sale systems within retail, and delivery orders through platforms like Uber Eats and Doordash. While front-end sales software has proliferated, back-end accounting tools have not kept up with the pace of innovation. SMBs are left sorting through multiple streams of data, relying on manual reconciliation by accountants and bookkeepers to avoid inaccurate financial statements or costly errors.
Bookkeep’s solution: Bookkeep consolidates data from multiple front-end revenue streams into back-end accounting systems. Bookkeep aggregates and normalizes sales data, updating daily financial entries in platforms like Quickbooks and Xero and reconciling payments automatically. Through its revenue cloud, Bookkeep saves hours of accounting labor, allowing finance teams to focus on critical business strategy instead.
Bookkeep’s origin story: Ruth Ku and Jason Richelson co-founded Bookkeep in 2018. With experience as a former founder, CEO, and financial advisor to a half dozen startups, Ku has decades of experience in the operation and financial management of scaling businesses. As the founder and CEO of Shopkeep, which sold to Lightspeed (LSPD ) for $440 million, Richelson has 21 years of deep technical experience in fintech and payments. Richelson founded Shopkeep after an experience as the owner of a chain of specialty food and wine shops when his PC-based point of sale system crashed and brought the business to a standstill. Richelson knows the pain points business owners face and has a proven track record of building products to solve them.
Why we’re betting on it: Today’s brands compete fiercely for customer acquisition. Making products available through a multichannel approach, across e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Shopify as well as point of sales systems like Square and Shopkeep, is a key strategy to remain competitive. Companies will continue to adopt multiple front-end systems to meet customers where they’re at, increasing complexity and making the need for an API integration layer and interface for accountants that much more pressing.
Our take: The rapid emergence of platforms and business models across multi-channel, subscription, and brick-and-mortar retail has accelerated challenges for data management and financial accounting. For SMBs, that challenge can be extremely costly. We believe platforms like Bookkeep, ZenBusiness, and Mainvest that automate tasks for small businesses and increase efficiency provide a crucial layer of support for growing companies.
Further reading: “bookkeep.com™ Secures $3.3 Million in Venture Financing led by Lerer Hippeau” via PR Web.
Learn about careers at Bookkeep.
