I’ve been involved in a construction SME for a couple of years now, and I’ve been consistently shocked by the administrative burden that HMRC impose on general contractors like us. Regulation like reverse VAT and CIS ultimately shift liability for our subcontractors taxation onto us, while the industry remains woefully under-educated in the consequences of not complying.

To save hours of paperwork a week, I developed a small app for managing our subcontractor “Accounts Payable”. It collects all the necessary information about the subbies trading style, makes it effortless for them to submit invoices in a standardised format, calculates CIS deductions and reversed VAT, and gives a real-time view of our liabilities.

We’re getting requests from every subcontractor to make the tool available to them for use in their own business, so from September I’m going to be focussing on spinning this out as a commercial SaaS and growing it from there. It feels like we’re very close to Produt-Market-Fit already… “Build something people want”.