Dan Hogan on the left and Aaron Shaw on the right, co-founders of Ember in discussion.

Introducing Ember

July 7, 2021
The world of work is changing, and the modern workplace (or lack thereof) has never been as exciting as it is today. Jobs have become fluid and work days, flexible; our holidays, unlimited and our colleagues, machines. Driven by technology and accelerated by culture, we’ve gone from closed companies of employees to dynamic networks of contractors. Everything about business is opening up…Everything, except accounting.It’s difficult to believe that, in an age of automation and professional autonomy, a trade as manual as accounting is still stuck in the dark ages. It’s full of complicated jargon and restrictive compliance; it requires us to pay someone else to know more about our numbers than we do. We’ve managed to bypass the recruiter, the landlord, the salesman in every other aspect of working life – so why is the accountant still very real, very ‘necessary’, and very expensive?They don't need to be. At Ember, we’re excited by a new age of small business finance that puts the power in the hands of the owner. We've got nothing against accountants; we’re accountants ourselves, hell-bent on catching financial compliance up with the modern day.Having worked as independent contractors in the UK, we were struck by how labour-intensive the process of small business finance remains: hours spent decoding HMRC’s website, precious time wasted categorising expenses, all whilst feeling increasingly anxious and in the dark about what the accountant was lodging on our behalf.So we started Ember – a brighter way to account for your business, from starting it, to closing it, and everything in between. Ember is the single software you need to manage your financial obligations. It’s an open system built for the open talent economy: words like debit, credit, ledger, reconciliation and journals are replaced with language you understand, and all the number-crunching you’d be paying an accountant £120 per month to do, is taken care of in the background. What you see is the important stuff: your tax position in real time, your automated tax return for review, all the important numbers in one central feed.We believe in an economy powered by small business, where everyone is able to work freely and flexibly, with no barriers to contracting or going it alone.Aaron & Dan