How this Raipur boy built a bookkeeping software

A few years after his BBA, Yashraj Agrawal found himself in the business of trading in industrial products. It was during this time that he realised there was a big gap in accounting software.
“We used to have an accountant who would come twice in a week, but on the days he did not come, it would be very difficult to pull invoices, ledgers, and do the whole accounting by ourselves. That’s when we got the idea of starting GimBooks,” Yashraj recollected during a fireside chat at the Chhattisgarh edition of TOI’s Technovate for India programme.
GimBooks is a bookkeeping and business management solution that is very Indian centric. It is easy to use and affordable to small business owners that still use traditional bill book methods. Most other software in this category are expensive, or difficult to use.
“GimBooks was started in 2018 as a simple invoice maker app. All the software at that point of time were on-premise. Which meant there was a need to have a computer to manage your books. What I thought was, it would be great to have a mobile app with which you could do all your accounting, invoicing, payments, etc. And the idea evolved,” Yashraj said.
Once a few users joined, they started liking it, and also gave feedback. Some asked for more features. “Whatever features users asked, we kept on building. And today we have 4 million downloads, 2.5 lakh active users, and we are launching in different countries,” Yashraj said.

But the journey was not smooth. They had lots of worries about taking external funding, worried if they would be able to pay back the loan they took. “When you are starting up, you will face many challenges, failures and setbacks. But you have to persevere, and that’s what we did,” Yashraj said.