This didn't start with a market report
It started with the set of books I have to rebuild every March.
One Hong Kong company, nine markets, no accountant
I run two Hong Kong companies. One is a made-to-order leather goods and jewellery brand selling into nine markets, with its marketing and CRM team in Shenzhen. The other is a water filtration retailer with a shop in Hong Kong.
Between them they generate: revenue in several currencies, platform payouts settled through Stripe and PayPal, receipts in Traditional and Simplified Chinese, mainland VAT fapiao, thermal-paper slips from the shop — and a statutory audit every year. Like most Hong Kong companies of that size, neither has a full-time accountant.
That shape isn't unusual. It is close to the default shape of a modern cross-border SME in Asia-Pacific — so when I started solving it for myself, I found I wasn't only solving my own problem.
Why that matters
I didn't find a market and then look for a problem to put in it. I had the problem, and had put up with it for years. That tends to sharpen the judgment about what genuinely hurts versus what merely sounds like it does — but it is also a risk, because both companies are mine, and two companies are not a market. That one is listed below.
In development — and we intend to keep this page current
Scalebook is not generally available. The first version runs on the two companies above, in stages: intake and archive first, then extraction with human coding, then supplier memory, platform settlement reconciliation, and only then automatic posting.
The first sentence we need is this: the auditor completed the audit with materially fewer queries than last year, and put it in writing. Until that exists there is nothing to sell. Once it exists, it is the entire pitch.
Five things we can't answer yet
Better on our own website than dragged out of us later.
Still in development, little real running data
What's described here is design and early implementation. Every accuracy figure in this industry is vendor-reported and unaudited — so we quote none of them, and we'd suggest not believing anyone who does.
Two companies are not a market
They'll teach us the workflow, but both belong to the same person. Proving this generalises needs three companies of genuinely different shapes — a services firm, a restaurant, a trading company. That's what we're looking for now.
Pricing is completely untested
Nobody has been asked what they'd pay. That's why there's no price list on this site — putting one up would be a guess. We intend to set it with our first partners.
No auditor has reviewed our evidence format
This is the biggest unknown. We publish the format on the auditors page precisely so somebody can tell us it isn't enough.
Payroll and work-in-progress are known gaps
Xero has no Hong Kong payroll and no MPF at all; valuing work-in-progress for made-to-order production isn't handled by any SME accounting tool. We haven't decided whether to buy, build, or leave those to a human for now.
Two sentences
An auditor saying "I wouldn't accept this evidence format", or three SMEs saying "I'd rather keep my bookkeeper". If you want to say either, we very much want to hear it.
Write to me directly
No helpdesk, no ticket number. Email reaches me and I answer it myself.
We reply personally. No newsletter, no drip sequence — your address is used to talk to you about this and nothing else.