We asked one of the Centrio HQ founders, YL Chow, about building an accounting management app in Malaysia. Centrio is a virtual accountant app that manages business transactions, taxation, and audits at an affordable cost. Chow came up with the idea of a digital accountant app when he realized the traditional accounting process is often filled with tedious and unorganized paperwork. When Chow was looking at options to build his app, he discovered that Bubble's extensive no-code features were incredibly easy to use for someone without any coding experience.
Tell us about your app and what it does.
CentrioHQ is a digital accounting service for Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) in Malaysia. We provide quality, efficient, and affordable accounting services, entirely on the cloud.
The platform allows our users to engage and experience accounting services in a seamless and fuss-free manner without having to go endure traditional methods of engagement such as unnecessarily mailing paper documents back and forth and scattered communications across SMS, WhatsApp, and emails.
A fuss-free accounting service enables our users to focus on running their businesses instead of waste time worrying about accounting.
How does your app work?
Anyone can engage our services easily with simple and transparent pricing. Once the users have signed up for a plan on our platform, they can immediately access their dedicated CentrioHQ dashboard and start uploading documents such as bills, receipts and bank statements via the platform for processing. Information on each document is then extracted via AI-driven OCR technology for speed and accuracy.
In terms of communication, our clients can simply live chat with their account manager on the platform if they have any accounting-related questions. We will also be able to request additional documents and/or clarifications from our clients via a dedicated query dashboard.
Every month or quarter, our clients will receive financial statements and reports informing them of their business' financial position. In each client's dedicated dashboard, they will also be able to see at a glance crucial financial information such as revenue, operating costs, accounts receivables/payables, etc.
Tell us a little about your background and how you discovered no-code tools like Bubble.
When my partner and I started our accounting firm in 2019, we quickly realized that we need to serve our clients on the cloud to eliminate the need to pass around paper documents that is often messy and time-consuming. Not only that, we needed a platform to centralize all communications with our clients as well as connecting with other backend services via API to automate recurring tasks and data extraction.
Neither of us had the time to learn full stack development to bring CentrioHQ to life. That's when I started to explore if there is any possibility at all to build apps without having to code. After some Google-ing, I discovered Bubble and decided to give it a go and was able to produce an MVP in under 10 weeks!
Why did you build your app on Bubble?
Bubble makes it so easy for anyone to build an app. Its intuitive interface makes it so easy to build logics and workflows to bring our vision of CentrioHQ to live. Being a non-coder, it's a no-brainer decision.
What I love about Bubble is that I was able to start building on the Hobby plan, which is completely free. Once I was ready to launch my app, the pricing of the paid plans is also very friendly to bootstrapped founders like us, which enables us to focus our resources on customer acquisition and provide a high-quality service.
The very active and helpful Bubble community also makes it so easy to get help during our build. Not to mention also there are plenty of free video tutorials on YouTube that provides insights, ideas, and how-to in building my app.
What have been your milestones or successes so far?
We manage to build a fully functional MVP in less than 3 months. When we first launched the MVP, we got our first few clients almost immediately, which gives us comfort and confidence that CentrioHQ is solving a real problem in the market. By these users via the platform, we were able to see real-time savings from onboarding to delivering reports to our clients in time. As we improve and optimize our processes, we believe we can achieve even higher efficiency in delivering our services.
What are your future plans for your app?
We are now actively acquiring and building up our client base. At the same time, we are also listening to user feedback to improve our platform continuously.
Providing accounting services completely on the cloud is a very new concept, at least in Malaysia. The immediate plan is to educate the market all about the importance and benefit of adopting this digital transformation in the engagement of accounting services.
As the user base grows and the platform stabilizes, we have planned for feature enhancement and expansion on the platform such as launching iOS & Android native apps, cash flow forecasting & management, AI-driven solutions, and deeper integration with other financial ecosystems such as banks, payment gateways, POS systems, etc.
Learn more about Centrio.
About Bubble
Bubble is a leader in the no-code movement. Bubble offers a powerful point-and-click web editor and cloud hosting platform that allows users to build fully customizable web applications and workflows, ranging from simple prototypes to complex marketplaces, SaaS products, and more. Over 400,000 users are currently building and launching businesses on Bubble - many have gone on to participate in top accelerator programs, such as Y Combinator, and even raise $365M in venture funding. Bubble is more than just a product. We are a strong community of builders and entrepreneurs that are united by the belief that everyone should be able to create technology.
Join the no-code movement today.
Do you want your app featured by Bubble? Reach out to us and tell us about your app. In addition to this series, we sometimes select our best apps to showcase on our website.
