The Evolution of Clear Books

Adrian who trained as a chartered accountant joins the Clear Books support team as a Support Accountant, to provide additional help and expertise towards the more tricky accounting questions the team receives.

Sebastian joins the Clear Books team as the first full-time personal systems administrator working out of the Fubra offices four days a week in Aldershot and the Clear Books HQ in London one day a week.

Emma joins the Sales & Marketing team at Clear Books.

Alex joins the Clear Books support team as a Technical Support Analyst strengthening the support Clear Books provides to its growing customer base.

Andrew joins the development team at Clear Books with a focus on back-end development and performance benchmarking.

Alex joins the ever growing development team at Clear Books having moved to London from Manchester.

Jay joins the development team as part of a summer internship from Imperial College, London.

Daniel joins the development team as part of a summer internship from Imperial College, London.

Patrick joins the Clear Books development team as part of a year’s industry placement from the University of Kent.

Tom joins the Clear Books development team as part of a year’s industry placement from the University of Kent.

Maria Jose joins the development team as part of a six month Leonardo Da Vinci grant backed scheme from Spain.

Adrian joins the development team as part of a summer internship from Imperial College, London.

Sheng joins the development team as a junior developer having recently graduated from Imperial College, London.

Usij joins Clear Books as a Technical Support Analyst to help bolster the support for the ever growing number of users.

Priya joins the Clear Books development team having recently moved to London from Manchester.

Julia Sikora joins Clear Books as part of a Leonardo Da Vinci grant backed internship for three months. During her time at Clear Books Julia assisted on the campaigns for the sales & marketing team.

Billy joins the development team at Clear Books on an internship from Imperial College, London.

Tim somehow manages to rope another sibling into the Clear Books family, and Lizzie joins the team to head up the Sales & Marketing department.

Adriana joins Clear Books as part of a Leonardo Da Vinci grant backed internship for three months. During her time at Clear Books Adriana assisted on the campaigns for the sales & marketing team.

A much requested feature for automatically importing online payments through payment gateway Paypal is added to Clear Books.

Matt Fairbrass joins the development team as a senior developer and lead user experience designer for Clear Books products.

Alpha joins the development team at Clear Books on an internship. Alpha will later go on to work for Clear Books full time.

Edward Halls (originally from Belize) joins Clear Books as its first full time developer.

To handle the additional extra sets of hands now on board at Clear Books, the team up sticks and move… across the hall to a larger suite. Now that everyone has a little more space and are not sitting on each others laps, Clear Books sets its sights on expanding the development team.

John joins the Clear Books team to head up the Customer Support operations as Clear Books begins adding hundreds of new users to the system.

Nick joins the team as Clear Books’ first full time member of staff heading up the Sales & Marketing aspects of the company.

Clear Books introduces a payroll module in beta for its users whom need to manage paying employee salaries and wages. This feature was built out of a need for Clear Books manage its own payroll as it takes on its first employees.

Clear Books announces its Bank Import tool feature to make reconciling transactions against the accounts a quick and simple task.

Clear Books signs up its first charity; passingiton, after the decision was made to offer Clear Books free to small businesses and charities (subject to usage limits).

The familiar Clear Books Logo is born and becomes the cornerstone for the Clear Books brand.

The web design work for Clear Books was finalised and could now be integrated into the system. The design overhaul brought the project on massively and the new visual elements helped provide a framework for the usability of the site going forward.

Prospect Glazing and Marble Construction became Clear Books first full time test users. With their input and feedback they helped ensure that the system worked and catered for the needs of a small business.

Initial development of the system begins in order to bring the concept to life. Tim Fouracre works closely with the developers at Fubra to make the idea a reality, taking on a lot of the development work himself whilst working out of his office at home.

Together Tim and Fubra outlined ideas and concepts for the Clear Books website design. This was the start of a lot of toing and froing with web design company Do1. Their hard work eventually paid off with a clear design to accompany the companies mission statement: Online Accounting To Free Your Time.

Tim Fouracre was working at Arbuthnot Securities as a research analyst covering small cap stocks listed on AIM. He invited Brendan McLoughlin, an old friend from Farnborough Sixth Form college, to come in for a chat about his company Fubra and go over some of the implications of floating on the stock market.

Later that month he happened to be talking to Brendan’s business partner; Paul Maunders (also an old  friend from college), about accounting systems. Tim had developed a simple web based accounting system based on the accounting principle of double entry (debits and credits). Paul had developed an invoice driven system for his brothers’ construction business, Prospect Glazing. They discussed the idea of sharing each other’s code to combine the two systems.

Paul and Brendan were in London later that month and invited Tim out for lunch. They suggested that Tim should resign from his job immediately, set up a joint venture with Fubra and develop an online accounting system. Tim knew straight away that he would agree and after ironing out the terms, and so the initial concept of Clear Books was born.