Collective has debuted an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered accounting platform designed for one-person operations.
“As freelancers delve into the administration needed to properly pay their taxes and keep their books up to date, they’ve been shocked by their choices: pay expensive local accountants and bookkeepers that often leave them in the dark, or spend hours on DIY finance,” the company said in a news release announcing “Collective Accounting” Tuesday (March 19).
“With today’s release, Collective has solidified itself as a third option, one that fuses human expertise with the efficiency of AI technology.”
On the front end, Collective Accounting lets users send and track online invoices from the platform, deploy automated payment reminders and collect payments via credit card or ACH, the company said in the release.
On the back end, it uses AI large language models (LLMs) to automate expense categorization, thus making sure accounting and bookkeeping are free from errors and deductions are captured to optimize tax savings.
“Solopreneurs, especially the growing number of Gen Z and Millennial freelancers, don’t want their financial data scattered across five different tools and still be stressed that they might have missed something,” said Collective CEO Hooman Radfar.
“They’re frankly tired of trying to make QuickBooks work,” Radfar said. “They shouldn’t have to choose between becoming accounting experts or overpaying CPAs.”
Collective Accounting is part of a wave of recent product launches aimed at solopreneurs, including one last month from QuickBooks designed for freelancers who don’t yet require an advanced accounting solution.
There’s also LegalZoom’s LZ Books, an online accounting solution built to help up-and-coming entrepreneurs manage their books, land new work and get ready for tax time.
With nontraditional career paths like freelancing are becoming more mainstream, solo entrepreneurs are recognizing the importance of investing in the infrastructure that supports their work, Josh Greene, co-founder and CEO of coworking app Groove, said in an interview with PYMNTS published last month.
“And I see that people are building a tech stack around themselves in a variety of different ways, whether it’s financial management, whether it’s supplier management with CRMs, whether it’s a sales pipeline, or [this] human infrastructure piece that we’re building,” said Greene.
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