My name is Sudesh Sud. I am the founder and CEO of disruptive new accounting software, APARI. I am an unashamed software geek having started in the profession with KPMG – one of the big four consultancy firms. I love software development challenges; there’s just something about turning such a vast and complex set of requirements into software that is simple, efficient and easy to use.

While working at KPMG, and despite training as an accountant, I decided that I wanted to be more adventurous and moved into the exciting world of Risk and Regulatory reporting software.

Well...it seemed exciting at the time…

The action-packed world of risk and regulatory reporting

What the experience did offer was the opportunity to work with some high-profile global clients, including for the global offices of Dutch financial firm, ABN AMRO, where I helped oversee the build and implementation of software to manage the Basel II Capital Requirements Directive that were brought in following the 2008 financial crisis.

The software company that ABN AMRO worked with was eventually bought out for €20m, which was an exciting result. 

Another particularly exciting project (for a geek like me, anyway) was setting up a subsidiary of JP Morgan with software to enable the efficient and easy central bank reporting ‒ something they needed to gain their full banking licence.

It was great to be involved in the full end-to-end delivery of that project, getting to work with almost every department of the business, and very rewarding to see it through to delivery and the awarding of their banking licence.

Settling back in the UK to become a father

However, as exciting as the non-stop thrill-ride of risk and regulatory software was, after 15 years travelling across the world, I wanted to stay still for a little while. So, I settled back into UK life and founded a property development business. A year or so later, my boys came along and I decided to settle down for good. 

But I also wanted to go back into software development ‒ my major passion in life. The trick was finding the right idea ‒ an underserved aspect of the market that could benefit from dedicated software.

I began thinking back to my time as a consultant to identify the pain points in my own experience. I used to hate doing my accounts. I wanted to spend as little time as possible putting together my accounts, VAT returns, year-end tax return, etc. etc. So, I did what most people do: hire an accountant.

Every year I would dutifully collate all the information my accountant would need to complete my accounts. Every year I was taken by surprise by my tax bill, often resulting in late fees. It felt like a bit of a mess.

What I realised was, although I was doing all the work collating my accounts, my accountant added very little value to the process. He simply took the information I had provided and put it into the format required by HMRC and Companies House.

The next year, as a bit of a test, I sent him my account information in the format he had sent to me, just updating the figures. Low and behold, he sent back the same identical report with the tax calculation from his accounting software, charging me £1,000 for the privilege.

I started to realise that all he was doing was relaying my own data back to me in an accounting format and charging me a small fortune for the process. 

The lightbulb moment 

I decided that if my accountant wasn’t adding any value and couldn’t give me business advice, but was going to continue charging me £1000 a year, I would create my own solution.

The founding ethos was that you should only have an accountant if they can add value. If they are simply reformatting your account information, they aren’t adding value. In fact, all that work can be quickly and easily done with software. And with HMRC moving towards the digitisation of tax, there was a real opportunity to create a great software solution for tax-returns at just the right time.

This was the start of something special; it was the start of APARI.

We spent two-and-a-half years developing the software with the aim of automating the accounting process. I hired a team of tax nerds and

distilled their collective knowledge and experience into the software. They now form our customer support team as well as informing APARI customers on any regulatory changes.

APARI now boasts being one of the very first software solutions recognised by HMRC to enable the transition to Making Tax Digital (MTD) over the next two years. Additionally, our Jellyfish product is still available for everyone submitting a self-assessment tax return, potentially saving huge amounts of time and money by simply automating the calculations.

That means, for people like you and I who hate calculating our tax, to simply fill in our account information, sit back, and let the software do the heavy lifting. We’ve even connected it directly to HMRC’s systems, so your tax return can be automatically submitted at the touch of a button!

We’re now working with AI and machine learning so that the Apari platform can complete even more of the process automatically, such as recognising recurring payments, so that we can take the platform to the next level.

With APARI’s tax software everyone can now benefit from an automated accountant . And I couldn’t be prouder!