Building the ClearFacts accounting app

ClearFacts provides accountants and their SME clients with a user-friendly tool to streamline their communication, digitise incoming and outgoing documents, record transactions and offer real-time reporting. With over 250 customers – and some of the largest accounting firms in Belgium among them – ClearFacts is proud to call itself a market leader. Tactics, in turn, prides itself on having built the web technology part of this application, which over 35,000 companies are using right now. We collaborated closely with the ClearFacts development team, which took care of the accounting software in the backend system.

Teamwork makes the dream work

The story of ClearFacts and Tactics started over seven years ago, when ClearFacts got in touch with us to build their platform from scratch. Tactics was a logical choice for them, given our experience in web technology, but the input and knowhow of the ClearFacts team was obviously invaluable to the success of the project – not only in terms of functional analysis, but also during the development sprints, which ClearFacts and Tactics developers ran and carried out together.

The Tactics experts took to working at the ClearFacts office, and the collaboration benefitted hugely from both parties sharing the same physical space, says Gert Vrebos, one of ClearFacts’ co-founders:

“We developed an excellent relationship with the Tactics team members. Analyses were shared between experts on both sides, we quickly got on the same page about the required functionalities, while testing efficiency increased. We acted as each other’s sounding board when changes to the platform were in order, too.”

To this day, Tactics has a developer working at ClearFacts to continuously improve their accounting platform.

“We developed an excellent relationship with the Tactics team members. ”

Improving and expanding the platform

In 2018, ClearFacts was acquired by Isabel Group, while nevertheless remaining an independent entity. This move propelled the company’s growth, gaining new customers and adding new functionalities to the platform at lightning speed. Last spring, Tactics and ClearFacts were hard at work building a module for the declaration of personal income tax, while a new approval flow for documents is currently in the pipeline, too. The latter involves payment automation, among other features. As should perhaps be clear by now, the ClearFacts platform is the most sophisticated in its field by far.

Gert Vrebos: “We owe our market leadership not only to the enormous care and attention we devote to the service aspect of our business, but also, and perhaps especially, to the fact that no one goes as far in automating accounting tasks as we do. Our platform scans incoming invoices in various formats and from various input channels, inferring the most important data such as invoice amount, invoice date and counterparty. It even determines the best booking method based on everything we know about the company and its history. None of our competitors offer a platform quite like this.”

“It’s rare to come across a company you can work with for so long ”

Partnership personified

What Gert likes most about the collaboration with Tactics? From the very beginning, he felt that ClearFacts was not just joining forces with Tactics by taking a few freelance developers on board, but that they had the entire team behind them. Gert: “Even though they were completely immersed in building our platform, the Tactics experts always retained a strong connection to their own company, able to rely on colleagues for advice if needed and frequently getting extra training opportunities. This not only made for steep learning curves; it also enabled Tactics to move up a gear whenever necessary.”

In addition, Gert loves how Tactics typically thinks in terms of partnerships rather than assignments. “It’s rare to come across a company you can work with for so long,” he explains. “The insider knowledge that gets passed on in this way – as opposed to consultants who get replaced every one or two years – is simply invaluable.” Another nice advantage that comes with such a close collaboration: ClearFacts doesn’t consider the Tactics team members outsiders, always inviting them along on teambuilding and afterwork drinks. “Our relationship with Tactics is simply invaluable to us,” Gert concludes