ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: COSTPOCKET
As part of our alumni spotlight series, today we are featuring CostPocket, a Lighthouse program Spring 2020 participant whose mission is to help accountants digitalize expense documents and receipts. CostPocket is based out of Estonia and has just expanded to Finland, where they are serving 100 customers. Each year, the amount of paper receipts produced decreases while digital receipts sent via email increases, proving a need for more digitalized accounting services. Their integration has the power to profoundly simplify business. CostPocket can save up to 63% of an accountant’s time spent on processing expense documents and data.
CostPocket had a somewhat less direct path to their current business model. Initially they started as a budgeting app for consumers, but then slowly evolved as they received feedback that individuals didn’t want to pay for a subscription. They ended up pivoting and transitioned to the B2B sphere, where they’ve had more success with digitalizing receipts and purchase invoices for businesses.
Before joining Lighthouse Program, Costpocket mostly interacted with accounting softwares, but Lighthouse provided CostPocket the opportunity to work with larger banks, such as Swedbank and SEB, which enabled them to get larger-scale market insights.
“Before Lighthouse we were mostly targeting small businesses, but with Lighthouse it was nice to talk with larger banks and obtain feedback. They gave us key insights about a new idea we were about to introduce.”
Joonas Sernjuk
COO
Through their interactions, CostPocket learned that a similar automated accounting service had been integrated in Norway, which is a promising sign for CostPocket’s expansion.
It’s widely acknowledged that constant tweaks and changes are necessary to fine-tune a company for success. CostPocket knows this and, interestingly enough, has changed their name three times – from wizard.finance to tsekk.ee (meaning “receipts” in Estonian) to their current name, CostPocket. This mentality of accepting failure and then changing is key if a company wants to excel in the fast-paced, rapidly evolving startup industry. Costpocket has applied this in their work so far, and especially during the coronavirus pandemic. The fintech ran into challenges with the implementation of their app in Latvia, but have now achieved 500% growth within a year, and hey are still working hard to figure out alternative integration methods for this new market – most recently partnering with an accounting app called Moneo.
We look forward to seeing the ways Costpocket shapes the Estonian fintech landscape: currently only about 10% of companies in Estonia are able to receive e-invoices, as opposed to Finland’s ~60%. It will be interesting to watch this race for widespread acceptance of e-invoices – which country will reach 100% first? We look forward to seeing what CostPocket accomplishes in the future and how they transform the nature of receipts!
