Khatabook aims to digitise services for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises

Maintaining account books in a traditional way is a time-consuming process. Over the last few years, most businesses, irrespective of their size, have felt the need to digitise their processes, and make them seamless and effective.

Keeping the need to digitise small businesses and build them up in mind, Khatabook, the digital book-keeping platform, was launched in January 2019. Speaking to afaqs!, Ved Prakash Yadav, VP, growth and marketing, Khatabook, says, “We realised that in terms of book-keeping, there was an explicit need to digitise certain services for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. The app helps the merchants in not only digital record-keeping, but also getting their collections faster and better.”

Khatabook currently has 10 million active users, and is available across the country in over 13 languages, including Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese and Marathi.

Scheduling payments, sending detailed weekly or monthly reports, sharing payment links and QR codes are some of the app’s features. Yadav shares, “The primary target audience of the app is small to mid-sized kirana (neighbourhood) stores, but on a broader scale, any Indian business can avail our services, like suppliers, distributors and small merchants.”

Conceptualised by creative agency Fatmen, Khatabook’s recent ad campaign, featuring cricketer MS Dhoni, addresses the impact of COVID on small businesses. Titled ‘Dhande ka vaccine’, the campaign aims to educate small business owners about the merits of adopting digital business solutions by overcoming age-old practices.

Sharing the reason behind getting Dhoni for the ad and the insight behind it, Yadav says, “We got Dhoni on board last year because he fits in for what our brand stands for. Trust and reliability are the things we were looking for in our brand ambassador. The insight for our recent campaign was the need to digitise the small businesses even further, because of COVID. Easy access to business accounts is a need that our app solves and Dhoni, as ‘Dhande ka doctor’, prescribes these solutions to business owners.”

The campaign has been launched in five languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu. The four-week-long campaign is available across media platforms like OTT, social media, and on mobile applications like ShareChat. In Gujarat and Maharashtra, Khatabook is also looking at print ads for its product, Biz Analyst.

It must be noted that the app is competing with the likes of OkCredit, QuickBooks and Xero.

One of the app’s features is that shopkeepers can add customers and all the transactions against them and, hence, maintain individual credit ledgers for each of their customers. The app also sends reminders about the money due, so that business owners can manage their cash flows efficiently.

Yadav mentions that many small businesses are yet to be digitised, and the platform will increase its efforts in this direction in the coming months. “The platform is currently aiming to grow its revenues by 30 per cent in the next quarter,” he concludes.