Hi there, I’m Aaron 👋 — alongside Dan, I co-founded Ember back in 2019 on a mission to liberate business owners from the burden of accounting and tax.
Following our recent £5 million investment, I wanted to share with you, the people we are building Ember for, our vision for the future, where we currently are on our journey and a little bit about some of the exciting things we have in store for you over the next 12 months. 🚀
The future we believe in for business owners
The average micro-business today spends ~20% of its time dealing with financial administration.
With over 5.5 million micro-businesses in the UK, we spend a jaw-dropping 10 million hours every single day just trying to keep up with our financial administration tasks.
This is a symptom of an ecosystem that is failing our business owners. It’s not okay.
For years, traditional accounting software companies like Xero, Intuit, and Sage have let us down.
Content with preserving a status quo that places the accountants they partner with in command of your business, their products are difficult to use by design and often restrict features to accountants only to reinforce that status quo.
The unfortunate reality is that for them, empowering business owners with the tools they truly need to succeed risks disempowering their accounting partners, from whom they drive the majority of their revenue.
For them, this broken ecosystem is a feature, not a bug.
At Ember, we believe in a brighter future for business owners, a future that puts you in command of your business, a future that liberates you from the burden of financial administration and empowers you with the tools and insight you need to succeed.
From invoicing to payroll, tax advice to tax submission, our ambition for Ember is to provide you with an all-in-one solution for your business that:
- Seamlessly connects all of your financial information in one place.
- Simplifies your ongoing financial tasks.
- Gives you a real-time understanding of your business finances.
- Helps you navigate all of your accounting and tax obligations.
- Provides expert accounting and tax advice when you need it.
Building a Better Ember
Since launching Ember back in 2020, we have had the privilege of helping thousands of micro-businesses navigate their financial obligations.
Over the last couple of years, we've been struck by how popular Ember has proven to be with so many businesses.
Throughout that time, we’ve learned so much about the challenges you face and how Ember can help solve them.
About 12 months ago, it became clear that to build the future you deserve, we needed to level up our infrastructure and rebuild Ember from the ground up with these learnings in mind.
Getting this right has been our core strategic focus over the last year, and while we still have a little bit to go, I couldn’t be more excited about the future this foundational change unlocks. 🚀
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What This Means for You
Over the last six months, you’ll have noticed we’ve updated our Dashboard, Transaction Management flow, My Tasks section, and Reports. Over the next month, you should expect to notice similar updates to our Invoicing and Onboarding flows, and by the end of the year, you should expect to have seen updates to every single aspect of the system.
With each of these updates, while you’ll likely notice some minor improvements to our UI, how you experience the features will remain the same.
The majority of the work we’re doing at the moment is work you won’t see — it’s mostly happening under the hood, and it’s intended to put us in a position that allows us to deliver much greater value to you over time.
If Ember were a house, you could say we’re relaying its foundations and rebuilding the core structure on top. Our previous foundations didn’t leave much room for expansion, but once we have our new plot sorted, we’ll be able to expand and build you that mansion with tennis courts and hot tub you’ve always dreamt of.
While we do have a couple of exciting enhancements in the roadmap, we expect the delivery of brand-new functionality to be quite limited during this next phase as we complete the transition, so our ask of you is to bear with us during this time.
As we make each of these updates, we will strive for feature parity by default
However, in some instances where certain functionality is providing limited value to a limited number of users, we may look to sunset it and instead focus our efforts on making the experiences you use, day in and day out, amazing.
If this is the case, rest assured, we’ll have a seamless migration plan in place to ensure you face minimal disruption.
Following the journey
We couldn’t be more excited about what’s to come over the next few years, and we’re incredibly grateful to have so many amazing businesses onboard for the journey.
Our promise to you is that throughout this journey, we will be open with you and provide you with a clear line of sight about what’s on the horizon.
To provide this visibility, we are sharing two new spaces with you today:
- Firstly, we’re making our roadmap public to give you visibility on some of the bigger projects on the horizon for Ember in the near future.
- Secondly, we’ll be launching our what’s new space to keep you posted on all of the new things, big and small, that have already landed.
As we enter this next phase, I wanted to close by saying thank you.
We are inspired every day by the amazing businesses that operate on Ember, and we couldn’t be more determined to help you succeed.
The road is long, but the future is bright.
Stay tuned,
Aaron ✌️