Software for whoever is minding the shop

Why it exists

Most business software sold here was written somewhere else and translated later. You can tell inside a minute: the wrong calendar, digits in the wrong script, a page reading left to right while you read right to left. It works, technically. It is also exhausting.

The other half of the market is a spreadsheet and a notebook. Honest tools, until the day a number in one contradicts a number in the other and nothing can tell you which was right.

Accto is the third answer. One system where the sale, the stock, and the accounting are the same record, written in the language and the direction you actually work in.

Who it is for

A business of two to fifteen people that holds physical goods and sells them in person and online. Clothing, homeware, cosmetics, parts, specialty food, small wholesale.

Whoever keeps the books there is usually doing four other jobs as well. So correctness cannot be a discipline you maintain. It has to be what happens by default when you record what you did.

What we will not do

We will not become a marketplace competing with the businesses that use us. Your customers are yours. Your storefront carries your name, not ours.

We will not hold your money as a business model, and we will not take a percentage of your sales.

We will not lock your records in. Anything you put in comes back out in a readable form, on any plan, including the day you leave.

We will not say something works when it does not. If a part of the product is not ready, the honest answer is cheaper for both of us than finding out three months in.

How we build it

Slowly, wherever it touches money. Accounting software gets exactly one reputation, and it is decided by whether the numbers hold up at the end of a hard week.

Anything that moves a balance is computed in one place, written in one step, and checked against itself. Unglamorous work, and most of the work.