Clear Books helps small businesses simplify accounting

The administrative burden of running a small business can feel overwhelming.
This is especially true for all the bootstrapped sole proprietors and business
owners who launched their business to capitalize on their strengths—not toil in
endless accounting, paperwork and tax compliance, which they likely don’t enjoy
or excel at.

Clear Books aims to ease this burden by providing simple online accounting
software for microbusinesses. Since 2008, the London-based company has
helped more than 10,000 small businesses take control of their finances.
Key to the platform are bank feeds, which import users’ financial transactions.
Before Clear Books integrated with Plaid, this was done through screen scraping,
a practice which involves copying data from one application for use in another.
But with the UK prohibiting the practice in early 2020, Clear Books needed a new
way to enable users to share their financial data.

“We also wanted a data provider who could set us up for the long term by
providing bank feeds from a wider range of banks,” says David Carr, CFO and
Head of Product at Clear Books.

That’s when Clear Books turned to Plaid.