{"id":42788,"date":"2023-10-20T15:23:47","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:23:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/taking-the-pain-from-bookkeeping-follow-the-founder-series-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:23:47","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:23:47","slug":"taking-the-pain-from-bookkeeping-follow-the-founder-series-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/taking-the-pain-from-bookkeeping-follow-the-founder-series-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking the pain from bookkeeping \u2013 Follow the Founder series – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Tim Stroh has always recognised that bookkeeping and accounting for small businesses is a pain and drain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cIt sucks resources from your business,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When he was running a customer relationship and digital marketing business he had two full-time staff whose job was processing payments and other routine bookkeeping tasks.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After leaving the business in 2010, he set out to come up with a way to automate paperwork processes, simplifying it for small businesses and freeing up accountants and bookkeepers to add more value to the services they provide.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stroh founded Bocastle, which uses patented technology to allow an image of a transaction document, such as an invoice, to be scanned and relevant information to be extracted, verified and entered in a business\u2019s accounting function.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The business won StartupSmart\u2019s<\/i> recent So You Think You Can Start-up pitching competition and will be part of our Follow the Founder series for the rest of the year.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stroh says he\u2019s a strong believer that the economy is driven by small business and wants to do whatever he can to help the sector.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cSmall businesses are the shock absorbers when times get tough,\u201d he says. \u201cThey tend to hold onto employees and suffer more pain far more readily because they\u2019re far more personalised. They know the person at the front of the shop and are reluctant to fire them.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stroh says while it may sound \u201ccorny\u201d, he says if he can remove the pain of bookkeeping for small businesses then he\u2019s made the world a better place.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stroh says Bocastle \u2013 which is the working title for the company and is likely to change \u2013 says he felt most validation for the product when, after being told by accountants what he wanted to do wasn\u2019t possible, his wife, who\u2019s an accountant in the film industry, read his proposal and saw it would work.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cGiven her background, that was fundamentally important,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Other accountants and small businesses have also since said it would work, including a chartered accountant who\u2019s become Stroh\u2019s partner in the business after seeing the prototype.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bocastle also has a Melbourne developer firm on board.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Stroh says they\u2019re currently seeking to raise $1 million to build a commercial product that\u2019s also scalable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tim Stroh has always recognised that bookkeeping and accounting for small businesses is a pain and drain.   \u201cIt sucks<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42788"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}