// About
Twelve years in accountancy. The rest building what it needed.
A qualified accountant who went from junior to partner, then left practice to build the technology he had spent a decade wishing existed.
Most software for accountants is built by people who have never been one. I spent twelve years being one.
2000 to 2012: accountancy
I qualified as an accountant and spent twelve years in practice, starting as a junior and leaving as a partner. That is the whole of my early career, and it still shapes how I work.
Practice teaches you something no amount of technical skill substitutes for: how to cost things honestly. Every hour has a rate, every error has a cost, and every process either earns its place or quietly eats the margin. You learn to look at a business and see where the money actually goes, rather than where the org chart says it should.
The part that became a career
Somewhere in those years I became the person who dealt with the software. Not by design — I was simply the one who would read the manual, run the pilot and work out whether the thing we had just bought was going to help.
That turned into a way of working. Bringing new systems into a firm properly rather than bolting them on. Automating the functions that consumed the most hours and returned the least judgement — reconciliations, deadline tracking, the reports three people rebuilt by hand every month. Making the technology fit the practice rather than asking the practice to bend around the technology.
The results were unglamorous and completely real: work that took days took hours instead, and the people doing it went back to work that actually needed an accountant.
2012: leaving practice
In 2012 I left accountancy to do that full time, as a technology advisor rather than a partner in a firm.
It was a significant decision and the start was not easy. Leaving an established position for something you have to build from nothing rarely is. There is no client list, no reputation in the new field, and every early engagement has to be earned twice — once for the work, once for the change of direction.
What I did have was the thing that mattered: I understood the businesses I was building for, because for twelve years I had been one of them.
What came out of it
I kept working with clients and kept building. Each engagement surfaced a problem worth solving properly, and enough of those turned into products that the products became a portfolio in their own right — seventeen businesses now, across accounting technology, professional membership platforms, property, education, retail, enterprise systems and infrastructure.
Several are on this site. Practice Hub UK and MTD Connect came from watching small firms pay per client for software they used four times a year. Apex Billing came from a reconciliation job that consumed days every month. The AOPA platform came from a professional body running its entire membership on email and a spreadsheet. None of them started as an idea. All of them started with somebody describing a problem that was costing them.
How I work now
The method has not changed much since practice. Understand the business before proposing anything. Cost the problem, not just the solution. Be willing to say that a process should be deleted rather than automated, or that a problem is cheaper to live with than to fix — because I am costing it the way an accountant does, and sometimes that is what the numbers say.
Two and a half decades of doing this from both sides is the whole offer: an accountant who can tell you what an inefficiency is costing you, and a builder who can remove it.