Accounting software start-up Stub has inked a new partnership with Yoco that taps into the payment company’s base of 200,000 merchants as part of a broader strategy to scale its business. Competing in an accounting software market dominated by Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, Zoho and others, Stub has positioned itself as “a simple and affordable alternative” to spreadsheets and other manual accounting solutions.Founded in 2023, the company specialises in building software that makes it as easy as possible for business owners with no finance experience or expertise to track sales, manage expenses, get paid and access financial records in real time.As part of its growth strategy, the group has been signing partnerships with companies that have relationships with small business owners, leveraging their large user bases to gain customers.The start-up’s first major partnership was with iKhokha, the payments platform recently acquired by Nedbank. In October, the business signed a big deal with Capitec, which is growing its merchant banking unit.The strategy is paying off with the company now sitting at just under 10,000 users, having had about 4,000 before the Capitec partnership. Stub co-founder and CEO Tayla Dandridge. (SUPPLIED) In an interview with Business Day, Stub co-founder and CEO Tayla Dandridge said Yoco has “a phenomenal base from a size perspective as well as [the] kind of merchants that Stub is trying to solve for — Yoco serves a lot of them already.”“These include solo entrepreneurs, micro-businesses and independent business owners that don’t necessarily have a finance function or an accountant.”Stub was founded by a team of former bankers who originally wanted to build a bank for start-ups. That journey resulted in a pivot to accounting when they realised the gap for a basic and easy-to-use accounting platform for small business owners.The company’s latest integration connects the Yoco system’s sales data with Stub’s accounting platform to automate reconciliations, giving businesses a real-time picture of how their business is actually doing financially.As each transaction occurs, Stub categorises it, matches payments to invoice numbers and tags a sale with location data, reducing the need for manually capturing information.“From a brand perspective, there’s fantastic synergy. From the beginning, Yoco has always been the champion of the underdog, the entrepreneur who’s building, hustling, [and] making things in the world, which aligns very closely to our world,” Dandridge said. “They own that front office really nicely from a product perspective — in restaurants and retail. And Stub is building the back-end engine, making sure your finances, bookkeeping and the sort of stuff behind the curtain are taken care of.”