"Basically, it made no sense to me that the banking and accounting were separate systems," Tim Fouracre wrote in an April 2020 Silicon Roundabout piece. He is the founder of Countingup, the UK business current account with accounting built in, and earlier founded the cloud accounting software Clear Books. He is a qualified accountant who writes code. Read our review of Countingup.
From a Games Catalogue to a Dance School Database
He has traced his career on his own site. At 15 he wrote a catalogue of games in Microsoft Basic, planning to sell them on floppy disk at school, and got as far as the catalogue. At 18 he needed a Microsoft Access project for his A Level Computer Science coursework while his mother and her business partner needed help with class registers and parent invoices at their dance school, so the project became a dance school database.
At 21, working alone as a web developer, he built affiliate websites, the best known of them a search engine that drew millions of visits.
Building Clear Books
His mother's school and his own website business both needed annual accounts and tax filed. As an accountant who could code, he built a cloud accounting package and called it Clear Books. In his 2020 account, it grew from his need to do the bookkeeping for his web development company and his mother's theatre school, and from wanting to help her remotely when he could not find a web-based system. Ruth Fouracre, who later became Clear Books chief executive, wrote on the company blog that he left his job as an equity researcher at an investment bank in 2008 to work on it full time, and that he leased a small office in Hammersmith, West London, and hired his first employee in 2010 after reaching 1,000 customers.
He ran Clear Books for nine years. In his own words it was his first "proper company" with employees and an office, and he wrote in 2023 that he is still a shareholder.
Founding Countingup
Years of importing bank data into accounting software convinced him the two belonged together. Bank feeds broke, imports were duplicated, and the books were only interpreted weeks after the transactions happened. He told TechCrunch in 2017 that he had the idea about three years earlier and began working on it full time that September. "If you are running a business then bookkeeping is a chore, wastes your time and is boring," he said. He pointed to as many as 4.2 million sole traders in the UK, from construction subcontractors to IT freelancers, as the market.
By April 2020 he reported more than 20,000 businesses banking and doing their accounting on Countingup, with about $1.25 billion processed through their accounts. In a March 2021 TechRound interview he said the plan was to grow the team from 30 to 80 people, and he wrote in 2023 that the company continued to serve tens of thousands of sole traders. He listed his years at Countingup as 2017 to 2023 and wrote that he is still a shareholder.
Starting Again With Tiny Software Projects
In November 2023 he wrote that he was starting a new company and would document it from inception, so the team would have the story of its genesis, to share lessons from past mistakes, and to crowdsource ideas. His site now lists a group of small products: TinyTax, which files simple CT600 returns and accounts for UK micro-entities, TinyReg, a search across more than 5.5 million UK businesses on Companies House, and TinyCalc, a UK income tax calculator that covers every tax year from 2011/12.
Processing figure converted to US dollars at the Federal Reserve H.10 rate of $1.2458 per pound on April 9, 2020.
