Why Accounting Firms Should Prepare For Digital Transformation

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Digital technologies drive significant transformations in every business and industry, including the accounting and finance sectors. However, since its work demands absolute accuracy and involves sensitive matters like taxes, the accounting and financial department is usually very cautious in adopting digitalization and thus reluctant to change.

Nghia Vu is the co-founder and CEO at Bizzi - a SaaS company providing automation technology solutions for businesses’ accounting and administrative processes. How can Bizzi help change the accounting system?

The time is ripe for a new start

Established at the end of 2019, Bizzi has been accompanying big players in the retail industry such as GS25, Circle K, and Guardian with solutions to automate their accounting process and manage incoming invoices, thereby saving 80% of invoice processing time, increasing productivity and reducing tax-related risks.

Over the past two years, what Bizzi is most proud of is helping businesses realize the value of robotic process automation (RPA) technology, and that digital transformation is the first step to shaping the future of Vietnam's accounting industry.

Before Bizzi, Nghia had worked at multinational companies for 15 years, involved in innovation projects to introduce new products to the Vietnamese market. During his study in the US, Nghia had opportunities to get to know some technology companies, and those experiences ignited the idea of ​​starting a business in Vietnam.

Considering Vietnam’s mandatory electronic invoices from July 2022, eight billion paper invoices must be converted into digital form. Digital technology in accounting is very crucial. Even when Bizzi was launched, cloud solutions and RPA were already familiar concepts in Vietnam. This is the ripe time to launch a B2B SaaS business.

“Target the pain, and ease it”

Each business has its own product/market fit definition, thereby embarking on different business development orientations. Looking back on the journey of the past two years, Nghia realizes that the story of Bizzi nearly fits Andreessen's definition of product/market fit - “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

• A good market is a big enough market: The number of businesses in Vietnam is over 1 million and still growing with the boom of startups and investment funds.
• A product can satisfy that market: According to World Bank research, an accountant can spend more than 200 hours a year on manual tasks related to invoices and tax reports.

According to Nghia, the success of Bizzi’s product is mainly measured by the number of automatically processed invoices in each business. If the number of invoices increases per business, then the product proves its high compatibility in the market. This is also Bizzi’s North Star index.

For an early startup, if the number of e-invoices increases 15 to 20% a month, that’s an impressive result. And since Bizzi’s pricing model is transaction-based, the sales also grow the number of invoices. For Nghia, this is the most precise and most understandable pricing model in the market for big corporations as well as SMEs (small and medium enterprises).

Nghia said there are two main reasons why Bizzi chooses to target medium and big enterprises. First, these companies have the budget to invest in technology solutions. Second, as big as their size is the “pain” of the accounting department, and our job is to ease that pain.

Still a long way to go

In our first year, Bizzi’s reputation was spread through word of mouth in many companies’ communities of chief accountants. As entering the growth phase, Nghia Vu believes that his product will still change drastically. Currently, Bizzi focuses on product development to meet the needs of the medium and large companies in the retail industry. In the future, Bizzi will look for solutions and cooperation models with other fields, including accounting, auditing, and logistics services. These are industries with a vast number of invoices from suppliers to handle.

With experience in revenue and expenditure, Bizzi developed a new product called Expense Management, which helps manage the business travel expenses of employees and departments. Nghia realizes that collecting invoices for accommodation and food services and submitting expense claims are still manual. Therefore, he believes this new product will optimize administrative time in the office environment.The story was produced in partnership with the Initiative for Startup Ecosystem in Vietnam.

This story program “Initiative for Startup Ecosystem in Vietnam until 2025” (also known as National Program 844) was approved by the Prime Minister on May 18, 2016, and assigned to the Ministry of Science and Technology of Vietnam in charge of implementation. The program aims to create a favorable environment to promote and support the formation and development of fast-growing businesses based on the exploitation of intellectual property, technology, and new business models.

Translated by Bich Tram