Halifax firm huumanizes bookkeeping

After ramping up behind the scenes for the last few months, Halifax-based fintech huumans.com officially threw open its virtual doors this week.

The bookkeeping-as-aservice platform connects small-business owners with customized financial services.

“We’ve been slowly onboarding, bringing on clients for the last three to six months,” Rob Boynes, cofounder, said in an interview. “Part of the reason for that is we want to create the right service for small business, and you have to get your feet wet, get in with real owners and real businesses.”

The huumans.com team includes founders of payroll software firm Wagepoint, and aims to help small and medium-sized businesses streamline their day-to-day business operations.

“Is it a true replacement?

I don’t know,” said Boynes. “We basically offer a bunch of services, bookkeeping, accountancy, payroll and some business analytics and insights. For a lot of SMBS, their interactions with accountants and bookkeepers … are largely negative. We want to support the business owner; this isn’t about filling in forms. We reconcile weekly, which pretty much no one else in the industry does.”

Boynes said huumans. com will let business operators make financial decisions based on reality, rather than what happened last year or a guess about what’s going to happen next year. He said there is not a certain type of client they’re trying to attract, but among them will be small-business owners who don’t necessarily have the needed experience or expertise in finance.

“We know the majority of small-business owners don’t start a business to run a business,” he said. “They start a brewery because they love beer, they start a restaurant because they want to cook food, they start a landscaping business because that’s what their dad did. No one really goes out and gets an MBA and works out the margins, finds out cardboard boxes are great and starts a cardboard box business.”

A fixed-price subscription to payroll work alone starts at $30 per month per employee, and drops as more people are added. Bookkeeping, including tax returns, starts at $297 per month.

“We don’t (set fees) based on revenues, and we don’t do it based on size. Obviously, if you have more employees, then your payroll is going to be a bit more money. We want to be really transparent in our pricing … so we have fixed prices, with bookkeeping plans and one payroll plan,” Boynes said. “That is significantly cheaper than anyone else in the industry right now; we’re very proud of that and we’ve worked very hard to get that number down, because we know that payroll is really quite a blocker for small business.”

Huumans.com opened for business with 15 employees and envisions growth as the business scales up. Boynes said one of the main goals of the founders is to be accessible.

“We wanted to create a brand and an accompanying environment which was the antithesis to what the current market is, which is a little predatory, a little vague, quite murky and opaque.”