Background
Bullet helps small to medium-sized businesses succeed by providing an online, cloud-based tool to manage their finances—without the expense of a bookkeeper or the need to learn complex accounting or tax rules. Bullet’s software integrates accounting rules for all countries into its workflows, so SME business owners need only to enter their information to automatically create their P&Ls, balance sheets, general ledgers, payroll reports (and more).
“Small businesses might use five-plus financial products for bookkeeping, accounting and banking. And those products don’t talk to each other in a meaningful way. Plus, they’re expensive and add workload for small business owners.
“That’s the scenario we’re solving for at Bullet—to make managing the financial aspect of business simple, seamless and cost-effective for small business owners.”
Bullet CEO and Co-Founder Peter Connor
With a solid 11-year run as a superstar in Ireland’s robust fintech scene, Bullet is now expanding its competitive position by creating a suite of profitability-focused products for SMEs. The goal, says CEO and Co-Founder Peter Connor, is providing tools that enable business owners to understand their company’s profitability without the burden of extra data entry.
Bullet’s path to accomplishing this is, first, integrating software acquired from Polydone (a project and resource management tool) and Quoters (a business quoting tool) into the Bullet platform and, second, concurrently creating a banking product, using a third-party banking-as-a-service infrastructure provider, to connect bank accounts and add context to banking data. The ultimate goal for Bullet is creating a neobank focused on the needs of SMEs in Ireland and the UK.
Challenge: integrating unrelated software into Bullet’s existing platform
To complete the software acquisition quickly, Bullet bypassed due diligence on the Polydone and Quoters software. Connor explains that each program has a solid track record as being fit for purpose and he understood the acquired software would be modified significantly during integration, making due diligence irrelevant.
Solution: A three-month definition process
Bullet presented a complex integration to Softjourn, involving an ambitious business vision, incorporating multiple unvetted software acquisitions.
Softjourn proposed a three-month, in-depth integration definition period, which the client accepted. During this time, Softjourn engineers dedicated themselves to understanding Bullet’s immediate and longer-term business goals and dug into the code bases of the acquired software to create recommendations about upgrades and changes needed for Bullet to achieve its goals, as well as how to move the integration forward efficiently.
The game plan presented by Softjourn included a variety of options, highlighting the costs and speed of delivery of each. After intense review and consultative discussions, Bullet identified its preferences to move forward.
Outcome
Softjourn will begin executing on the final game plan as a result of its intensive definition period and extensive consultation with Bullet in early Q2 2022. Expectations are that the Polydone and Quoters software integration will be complete in late Q3.
