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The importance of professionally executed accounting and reporting is often overlooked by mostly small businesses as they consider it to be a financial burden. Chukwuma Nwanze, CEO, ARKounting Business Concepts Ltd however tells Caleb Ojewale, that exploring outsourcing services could offer the services of professionals at extremely low fractions of usual costs. More importantly, businesses will be able to get insights and business analytics while they focus on growing their core businesses. Excerpts:
What is Arkouting all about?
We are a technology and professional services firm, with a focus on micro and small businesses. We provide back office operations for them, so we believe for example that start-ups should focus on their core activities, and focus on growing the business. While the back office operations are very important, you don’t need to stress yourself trying to resolve such issue; that is what Arkounting is there for. To provide you with finance, human resource services, for instance, we can help you with training, recruitment; especially of accountants.
We also have a team of software developers so we build very simple, affordable business solutions that can cater to all your business needs. dealing with repetitive processes for example instead of pushing paper, waiting for the boss to come, knowing that you’re growing a business, we can build very simple solutions, specific to your business that are hosted on the cloud and wherever you are you can approve transactions.
The important thing is that everything for us is affordable; we understand that small businesses don’t have all the money in the world. If they even have money, it is best they use it for the core of their business and towards growing. So, we thought of providing services to these guys and something that is affordable, that is on a subscription basis where they can pay for it according to their cash flow, and at the end of the day we have a very happy kind of relationship.
What has been the response so far?
You know, first and foremost, the SME market in Nigeria is huge so we’ve seen appreciable growth since we opened shop last year. We believe the market out there is really large. The response even without so much of marketing in the last year has also been good, so the opportunity is there and we see it, and we believe that with the right publicity and marketing approach we will be able to reach out to much more.
In another a year from now, where do you see Arkounting?
We are hopeful that by the turn of the year or very early next year, we will be pushing the market to a self service financial reporting solution. We believe that, while we sell the professional service of record keeping and financial reporting, we want businesses to be able to do it themselves at a very affordable price. So while I can’t come out with the price (yet), we will be commissioning this at some point later in the year or early next year. It is an accounting solution that is cloud specific, which helps you with your financial information, reporting, business analytics, all for a very low price.
What does this pricing template presently look like?
The size of an operation typically determines the price. The size of the organisation and how many transactions they carry out can guide in how we price. We don’t have a one size fits all pricing. I will say we leverage on technology a lot so our prices are flexible. We don’t believe we should be at your premise, so we save you on premise cost. But, our CFO in a box service for example, I’ll like to say that you’ll be getting the services of very experienced chartered accountants for less than the price of recruiting a fresh totally inexperienced graduate from the market, or I like to put it this way, for the same amount you could be paying your gateman.
