Success Story of Khatabook: Simplifying Bookkeeping For Small Businesses In India

In today’s busy and hectic life, it often gets difficult to maintain a log of each and every transaction we do on a regular basis. Keeping a record of all the expenses is no less than a challenge for several people. But thanks to the digital transformation in India.

Now, with the emergence of several business management software, businesses and individuals can manage their accounting effortlessly. Khatabook is one of such reliable online platforms that has made managing business and personal ledgers a breeze.

Founded by Ravish Naresh along with some of his friends, Khatabook has become one of India’s fastest-growing SaaS companies within a few years of its launch. In this article, we will discuss the success story of Khatabook and its founders. 

How Did It Begin? 

It all started in 2016 when Ravish Naresh along with some of his college friends launched a digital spend manager app – Kyte.ai. The aim behind starting that platform was to help users understand their expense patterns using their SMS alerts. Initially, Kyte managed to gain a lot of traction and received a good response from people. However, the platform somehow did not reach Ravish’s expected growth scale. 

On digging deeper, the team realized that first-time online users did not want to deal with digital transactions as they were still relying on traditional khata or ledger books. That’s when the idea of khatabook materialized for Ravish and his team.

Ravish always wanted to build something that would help people. Therefore, he and his teammates started working a simple cash management app and named it as “KhataBook”.  Basically, the motive behind giving that name was to stress on the idea that traditional khata can be replaced by digital khata in this modern world. 

Obstacles In The Road

Just like every other startup in India, Khatabook also faced its fair share of challenges in its journey and their biggest obstacle was the lack of funds. In the beginning, they didn’t get enough funding to grow their business and Ravish realized that they needed to look into serious funding options.

Their second and probably most difficult challenge was to convince offline shopkeepers to join the online platform and train them for digital transactions. However, defying all the odds, Khatabook managed to persuade traditional enterprises to embrace digital transformation. Today, the platform has registered around 10 million monthly active users and the numbers continue to grow. 

Growth Of Khatabook

Khatabook has made the lives of several SMEs much easier. Now, small business owners don’t have to rely on their traditional ledgers to do their accounting. With Khatabook, users can record all of their daily transactions and keep a digital record of it.

Not only this, they can also track business transactions safely and securely, collect online payments, and send periodic reminders to creditors via SMS as well as WhatsApp. Scheduling payments, sending detailed weekly or monthly reports, and sharing payment links and QR codes are some of the other amazing features of this app. 

Currently, Khatabook has active merchants in approximately 95% of Indian districts, recording more than $100 billion in transactions with over 150 million app users. In fact, Khatabook is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in India.

The platform has already managed to build a widely accepted tech ecosystem for MSMEs across the country and will now concentrate on the disbursement of financial services through its tech platforms.