Our History

Our founder, Duane Jackson, started his first business in late 2002 with the help of the Princes Trust. He quickly realised that most of the accounting software on the market at the time simply wasn't designed to be used by owner-managers with no accountancy training or knowledge

As a web developer (someone who writes computer programs for the internet), he had the skills to put something basic together that suited his own requirements to issue sequentially numbered invoices and track what was paid and what wasn't.. At the time he was sharing an office with a number of other business that had just started. As the resident computer geek, he'd often get asked what he was using for creating, sending and tracking invoices. Everyone else had the same problems he'd had and were either using spreadsheets or a manual system.

He got a few people set up on his system and got feedback on how to improve it for them. The important thing was that they were all business owners with no accounting knowledge and not particularly great IT skills.

The product was christened KashFlow and it was initially marketed to members of the Federation of Small Businesses and other Princes Trust startups.

The cycle of asking for feedback and improving the software continued (and we still do this now), with the emphasis being on ease of use.

Over the past few years we've grown very quickly and are now the market leaders for web-based accounting software in the UK. There are now 20 of us. We're chaired by Lord Young (former Cable & Wireless chairman). We were the first ever accounting software to be certified by PayPal for our integration with them. We were chosen by three of the biggest franchises of accountants, Tax Assist and Abacus and AIMS to provide their software. Plus lots of other exciting stuff.

We've also won numerous awards - including the Software Satisfaction Awards that are voted on by users of the software instead of a panel of expert judges.

We've always felt that accountants were an important channel to work with. Rather than just ask them to re-sell or recommend our software to their clients, we instead chose to develop a product that would allow them to take advantage of "the cloud" and make it a 'no-brainer' for them to work with us.

Orbit Accounts was launched in 2010.