This Dutch startup wants to help freelancers & SMEs with a super simple accounting app

“Self-employed workers are happier than salaried employees. Specifically, they’re happier with their work (85% versus 71%), more often enjoy daily pleasure (83% versus 74%) and experience less stress (28% against 39%).”

This was revealed in a research commissioned by Tellow, an accounting app that makes the life of freelancers easier. It provides the right tools capable of handling the process from invoice to payment.

Anyone who has freelanced knows the agony freelancers feel when they’ve to keep track of invoices to be sent to their customers and payments they need to collect. It is because accounting is not a freelancer’s core strength and they wish someone would do it for them.

Below are the four things you may need to know about the Dutch startup Tellow if you are a freelancer who wants to get rid of the headache of keeping track of invoices.

#1 Features

Receipt scanning: With Tellow, freelancers and solopreneurs can just scan the receipts via their mobile phone and find them clearly arranged in the mobile app. For example, if you scan car fuel receipt, Tellow places the receipt under your car costs in your administration.

The app also helps find out how much VAT you can pay or get back. Tellow is linked to your bank account and lets you have real-time insight into your financial administration. It also shows current account balance and recent transactions so that you’re always on top of your financials.

Tellow app also shows what amount of VAT you have to reserve in advance or get back.

Payment notifications: Whenever your client transfers payment, you’ll get a notification.

#2 Price

Typically Tellow charges € 10.22 per month for sending eight invoices and managing 10 vouchers in the app (initial sign up indicates users will be charged €5 per month, plus 29 cents per receipt or invoice).

There’s a nifty tool to usage-based calculate costs Tellow has made and you can use it here. The tool lets you determine the price of using Tellow (based on the number of invoices and vouchers you process).

#3 How to use

Users can sign-up for Tellow using its web app. During the sign-up process, users are asked to opt at which bank account do they have the bank account followed by a question about the legal status of the user (such as one-man business, BV, VOF or other).

For a 3-months trial period, users are charged €5  per month, plus 29 cents per receipt or invoice. Tellow is terminable on monthly basis.

Currently, Tellow is suitable for freelancers with a business account at Rabobank and the users need to have a Chamber of Commerce number to be able to complete the signup process. Once successfully signed up, you can use the app to process invoices, scan receipts and keep track of your VAT and other financial details.  

#4 Privacy

The privacy statement of Tellow reads that “all parts of Rabobank Group process personal data.” It further notes that “within Tellow, your personal data can only be used by employees who need access to this in view of their function. Our employees have a duty of confidentiality“.

The best thing about Tellow’s privacy policy is (though most privacy and data-security policies have a lot of jargon) that it allows the users to see which personal data the app accesses and how it uses it.

You can request an overview of the personal data that has been processed about you at Tellow.

Takeaway

While the survey (which Tellow commissioned)  indicates that freelancers (or call them self-employed) are happier than salaried employees, there might be a distinction you need to make while reading the survey results.

A similar survey (but one with a bigger sample size of 8,000 people) was carried out by McKinsey in 2016. It concluded that independent workers can be categorized into four groups, namely free agents, casual earners, reluctants, and cash-strapped.

We assume ‘free agents’ and ‘casual earners’ might be the ones most interested in Tellow as these groups tend to be richer than the last two groups mentioned above. Here are the McKinsey survey results you might want to have a look at.

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