Warwick Leicester and James Henderson

After working together in London for over seven years, creative duo Warwick Leicester (Rocket-media.net) and James Henderson (The Brilliant Path Group) founded Brightbook, a free online bookkeeping service for creatives. With a unique visual approach that redefines the otherwise stale task of managing accounts, Brightbook hopes to make the process of bookkeeping easier for those who find the task tedious. Notes on Design spoke to Warwick this week to find out a little more about the idea.

Notes on Design: Can you tell us about more about you?

Warwick: James and I both work, and always have done, in the creative industries. By day I am a website developer and James is a creative director at a branding agency. As with all developers, I’m constantly trying to find new innovative ways to save time for humans, while simultaneously trying to communicate how that technology works to clients in ways they’ll understand. James works with both small brands and global names – guiding brand strategy and positioning and transforming how they are experienced, in the most compelling ways possible.

Notes on Design: So, what is Brightbook?

Warwick: Brightbook is an online bookkeeping service for people that don’t like doing their bookkeeping. While it takes the sums very seriously, it’s for people that don’t take themselves too seriously. It makes you feel differently about Bookkeeping, it’s very unfinance-like. That’s our goal, to do bookkeeping better than anyone else and to not make people anxious before they start, or bored or frustrated while they’re doing it. Right now we’re small but we’ve got big ambitions. Day by day we’re coming up with new ideas that will improve Brightbook and make it better for people – we’re also getting invaluable feedback from our users telling us what they want. Right now we just hope that people join our movement, and help us change the way people perceive bookkeeping and accounting to be.

Notes on Design: Why did the concept for Brightbook start?

Warwick: For James and I bookkeeping is the least enjoyable part of running a small business. We both have accountants but still the methods of gathering data can be stressful, especially if you don’t keep on top of things. We’d both tried lots of different solutions but for what we needed we just found them frustrating and expensive. Brightbook happened by mistake in a way, through our shared experience, through some rough code I’d mashed together and the idea that we couldn’t be the only people to dread bookkeeping. We said from the start that we’d create something that didn’t ‘feel’ bookkeeping or accounting. Breaking with convention and not going for blue or green gives you a sense of our attitude.

Notes on Design: Brightbook is only available in the UK at the moment, what are your global plans?

Warwick: To be global eventually. In the short term we’re working on a version for the US, New Zealand and Australia – and in addition, we’ve had requests from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany & France (this will be for when we have to go multi-language though).

Notes on Design: What one piece of advice would you give to young freelancers or new businesses on bookkeeping?

Warwick: No matter which method you use for Bookkeeping, keep on top of it, try not to let it be one of the things you put off until ‘tomorrow’!

Notes on Design: So, what is Brightbook’s future plan?

Warwick: Improving what we’ve got now. There are things that we can do better and some features that we’ll add. In time we’ll offer additional paid for features. The additional features will do some of the more complex but incredibly useful things. Right now the key is getting support for Brightbook, getting people to join our little bookkeeping revolution!

Tags: Bookkeeping, Brightbook, James Henderson, Warwick Leicester

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Design Careers, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.