I've been running my own businesses since my early twenties — a digital marketing agency, consulting, web development. And like just about every small business owner in Australia, I lived in Google Sheets.
Client contacts in one spreadsheet. Invoices in another. Quotes copy-pasted from old emails. Bookings in my calendar with reminders I'd forget to set. Expenses stuffed in a shoebox until my accountant started chasing me. I told myself it was "good enough" — until tax time proved me wrong, every single year.
Come BAS season, I'd lose entire weekends reconciling numbers that didn't add up: missing receipts, invoices I forgot to record, GST I had to double-check line by line. It was stressful, expensive, and completely avoidable. And the worst part was paying somewhere north of $200 a month for a stack of tools that caused the mess — none of which talked to each other.
I figured it was just me being disorganised. Then I started consulting for other small businesses — and found out it wasn't.
I didn't want to assume — so I looked at 200 businesses
I've spent more than a decade in digital marketing, web development, and consulting with Australian small businesses. So I had opinions. But opinions are how you build software nobody asked for.
So across my consulting work I paid attention to more than 200 Australian small and medium business owners — tradies, restaurant operators, salon owners, freelancers, personal trainers. Plumbers in Melbourne's west, restaurant owners in the CBD, salon operators in Sydney, designers all over the country.