Senta

Idea

Introduction

Many people have an accountant - perhaps you do - but what you may not realise is just how incredibly busy accountants are, running and managing their own practice. So we started Senta with a really simple concept: to build a great cloud service to help accountants run their practice.

We have found each accountant needs to keep track of 10 to 15,000 tasks every year. And each client service – VAT, payroll, tax returns and so on – has various deadlines and document requirements, many of them recurring. Even without the accounting, just running an accountancy practice takes a lot of time.

We want to give accountants a solution that will ease their admin burden and help them earn extra fees. So we’ve created Senta: an elegant cloud service with powerful features to schedule tasks & deadlines, help with marketing & CRM, and improve security and customer service.

Senta aims to help practices increase their productivity, boost their profits and deliver great customer service.

Intended impact

With Senta, our aim is to enable accountants to spend more time finding new business and doing fee-paying work.

Our platform looks after an accountant's clients throughout their life-cycle. Senta automatically initiates all the services and jobs for a client. Senta seeks approvals and sends emails and notifications as required, making sure nothing is missed.

Senta keeps practices informed too. Practice staff receive notifications for everything they need to do, and it informs practice managers if anything is not going to plan.

Senta comes ready to go: when users sign up, they don't need to spend days or weeks configuring and setting up.

But everything in Senta can be changed to suit the practice. There's no capital expenditure and no maintenance: they just sign up and start. And if we do our job right, we hope we'll keep those customers for life.

With the time-savings, efficiencies and increased revenue opportunities, we believe accountancy firms could benefit hugely by using Senta.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We've produced a super-reliable software platform that runs on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones alike. We’re improving it all the time, by constantly talking to our clients, and we get great feedback. We’ve listened carefully to their requirements and added features including electronic signing, texting, email marketing, time recording and financial integrations, all joined up with an amazing workflow engine.

We’ve built marketing materials, like brochures and videos, tested a variety of promotional channels and monitored KPIs as we go. We’ve been able to reach out to accountants across the UK. We’ve grown steadily, doing everything by hand ourselves, refining what we do to make sure that product/market fit is excellent, and our testimonials reflect our effort.

We’ve internationalised the product and it’s in use already in sixteen countries. Recently we’ve taken on our first team members: two developers and two client support advisers. We’re recruiting a marketing exec now, which, along with the two founders, should give us the team we need for the next year.

We’re ready to scale, not just in the UK, but around the world.

Monetisation strategy

Senta has a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model which we believe to be very scalable.

We charge accountancy practices a monthly per-user charge of up to £29 per month (less if paid annually). Their clients use it free of charge, and larger practices pay less per user. We offer each practice a free, unlimited 30-day trial.

Senta users get every feature that is in the product, and are given access automatically to every new feature that we develop. We want every user to get a better experience month by month and we believe this would help ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty – as well as boost word-of-mouth recommendations.

Our high margins mean that we can invest heavily in marketing and continued product development. , in order to drive growth and ensure low churn.

Use of proceeds

Investment raised through Seedrs would be used to scale UK growth and then develop overseas markets.

We would use investment for:

• continued product development
• support & marketing staff
• marketing materials, such as webinars and explainer videos
• promotional activity
• PR
• international expansion

We need to drive customers into our sales process but ensure they have a great product experience – right from the start of their trial period with Senta. We believe that support staff will play a critical role in enabling rapid growth. They’ll be giving engaging advice and guidance to users at scale, using video, webinars and automated emails.

We would continue to invest in diverse promotional activities, such as pay-per-click (PPC) and content marketing, monitoring the ROI closely to identify the most profitable promotional channels.

We would accept over-funding, using additional funds to accelerate our marketing programme.