Accounting is more than just churning out financial statements. One of the chunkiest and less appreciated parts of accounting is bookkeeping, which is always overlooked and undermentioned. Bookkeeping is fundamental for good accounting as it serves as the data input to producing a good and accurate accounting. With the traditional way of accounting, it involves much clerical manpower to keep and organize the transaction records which will later be input into an accounting system. Simple as it sounds, it’s actually prone to human error and very time-consuming when searching for a certain piece of information out of all the records available.

With the objective of freeing up accountants from such robotic and mundane tasks, Jason Sian and Ricky Wijaya, co-founders of Workspez Technologies put together their expertise and knowledge in system development to develop a suite of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to assist accountants with their day-to-day tasks in 2018 effectively. They first created Workspez Cloud Accounting Solution that enables accountants and business owners to easily churn out their management accounts with a friendly UI. With the base laid out, they then develop a proprietary AI Bot Bookkeeping solution where accountants can simply scan and upload any type of business transaction documents such as invoice and payment receipts into the system and all the key transaction details will be extracted and converted into digital data that can be automatically input into several accounting solutions available in the market.

However, their effort doesn’t stop there. Workspez Technologies has also developed a digital document storage solution with OCR capability that allows users to search for scanned documents by its digital wording despite being in JPEG (photo) format which otherwise is not possible. This has saved the bookkeeper tons of hours in going through the physical file simply just to retrieve a piece of document, especially during audit season.

In 2021, Workspez Technologies has extended its product line further into Business Intelligence that allows business owners to read their accounting data in a more layman-friendly manner, understanding the business performance through quick and simple visual presentations. Through that, business owners will be able to understand key performance indicators such as best performing branch and product, debt payment, and collection cycle to manage their business and cash flow better.

Despite being high-tech since day one of their business, Workspez Technologies didn’t forget about the needs of the more humble businesses, the likes of mom-and-pop shops across the Indonesian archipelago. Ricky Wijaya, one of the co-founders who is also an Indonesian, found that there is a very simple need from these sporadic and rather micro-scale businesses in the islands of Indonesia. All such business owners need is to be able to record their daily business transactions in the simplest possible way and to be able to send bills over a mobile chat system such as Whatsapp. Within 6 months of launch, the mobile application by the name of Laaku, which also means good business in the Indonesian language, has successfully garnered thousands of users.

Thanks to the Malaysian and Indonesian co-founding duo, Workspez is currently serving SMEs not only from Malaysia but also in Indonesia and Singapore. With a humble start, this homegrown AI tech startup has also started serving large enterprise clients such as United Overseas Bank, Bakertilly, Maybank, Astra Ventura, and Ringan in solving their day-to-day accounting processing tasks. Workspez Technologies has a strong competitive advantage with their frontier technology coupled with closed-to-ground senses on business needs in the ASEAN region.

Last June 2021, Workspez is selected as one of the 30 startups for the Global Accelerator Program under Malaysia Global Innovation and Creativity Center (MAGIC). During this program, we have learned a lot about every crucial element to grow and scale a startup. The three months GAP program is packed with intense learning, sharing sessions, and our favourite is mentoring sessions with industrial experts. The material of learning consists of finance, operations, MVP, UI/UX, legal, leadership, and many more. We also meet with few prominent entrepreneurs, leaders, and also venture capitalists during the GAP sessions to get insight on what area that they are looking for in the startup before they make any investment.

During the program, we are free to get time with a list of mentors, who are ready to give their insight and advising us on few matters. Apart from these, we were also given a lot of chances to network with other entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, government bodies, and corporates. Three months goes really fast, we started to miss the intense learning even after the program end. We really thank the Magic team for such an opportunity to be part of the GAP program. 

This content is provided by Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Centre (MaGIC).

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