The Edge You Never Knew You Needed

I've been building businesses for 10 years and not once did I truly understand my own numbers.

That's not something most founders admit, but it's the truth.

When I look back at my biggest wins in business they all circle back to the same thing which is - understanding money. The times things went well, I had a slightly better grip on my finances. The times they didn't, I was flying blind.

I think building a business really comes down to one question: how long can you stay in the game? The answer to that is always cash flow. Always. You need to know how to earn it, as well as keep it and where is best to spend it.

The frustration that started everything

For the last decade, every time I signed up to a cloud accounting platform, it did the opposite of what I needed. It made things harder and I realised why last year. These tools weren't built for me - they were built for accountants to do a better job managing my books.

The business owner, the person actually running the company was an afterthought.

When I spoke to my own accountant about it, he showed me his reality. Multiple software platforms open at once. A shared document full of client login credentials just to access everyone's Xero. His team spending hours on admin that should take minutes.

The frustration wasn't just on my side it was on theirs too.

Accounting software is one of the last untouched industries. We've had the same legacy platforms dominating for 10, 15, 20 years. They built great businesses and grounded themselves in global compliance, credit where it's due. But we need something better, something that actually answers the questions business owners are asking.

Two questions that matter

Every business owner really wants to know the same two things:

How do I spend less? And how do I earn more?

They're business survival questions. Usually to get the answers you'd hire a CPA, a financial analyst, or pay for an expensive consultant.

As I started to solve my accountant's problems I noticed that if you make the process of doing your taxes and recording transactions easy enough that people actually do it properly, those same figures produce every single financial insight you'd ever need.

The compliance data IS the insight data and you don't need two systems, you just need one that's smart enough to do both.

This isn't just compliance software

Aarvo is not just a tool to keep your business compliant and it's not just a tool to make tax returns easier.

It's a tool to tune your financial decision-making to actually understand the numbers behind your business so you can make better moves. At the end of the day, businesses exist to accomplish something - and to make money doing it. But you can't improve what you don't understand.

That's why when people set up businesses, they're not charities. You need to learn the numbers and know the details, only then you can make the informed decisions that actually move the needle.

The edge

I've been around financial markets since I was 15. FX, stocks, crypto, finance in general and it's always excited me. One thing that's always been true in markets is that having an edge is everything.

The traders who win are the ones who understand something others don't.

Business is no different - the businesses that outperform their competitors are the ones that deeply understand their finances but deeply enough so that they have an edge, and you can only find that edge usually in the finances. Even if you are doing a front-facing A/B test which is purely marketing based, how do you measure its success? The ROI/Money/Conversion - it all leads to money and understanding what works, and what doesn't.

Aarvo is your business edge.

It gives you the visibility that most business owners simply don't have, because the tools they've been using were never designed to provide it.

Compliance is the easy part

The compliance side of Aarvo (MTD submissions, VAT returns, expense categorisation, quarterly reporting) that satisfies your 'need' to have a cloud accountancy software. It works, it's seamless, and it's top-notch.

Understanding where your money goes, spotting the patterns and knowing your runway before it becomes a problem is what changes how you run your business and the layer we provide on top of compliance.

Built from scratch

I built this from a deep, personal pain point.

10 years of frustration.

10 years of never having the answers when someone asked me a financial question about my own business, but still managing to squeeze through and build good companies.

This is the superpower I've been dying to have and now I have it. I've accomplished some things over the last ten years in business alongside some insane numbers, but with this, I can 1000x my result.

I can see the real-time knowledge to allow me to spend less, earn more and look forward to manage my cash flow to continue.

What's next

I can't wait for you to see where Aarvo goes. The goal is to become one of the market leaders in cloud accounting and financial insights for sole traders, businesses, and enterprises at every level, so you can finally understand every element of your business just by asking your finances.

Welcome to Aarvo, let's build something better.

Harrison Gwinnett Founder, Aarvo