Almost everything that we take for granted in our modern world is built upon 3 major human revolutions.
The first and most obvious revolution is the Technology Revolution.
You are reading this on a device that uses millions of transistors crammed onto a tiny square of silicon, all working in perfect harmony to show letters on a screen—often “repainting” them many times a second. A screen of text is one thing, but all the electrons that are marshalled in perfect concert, to play back a cat video that a friend sent to you, is truly remarkable. Welcome to the 21st century.
But even this incredible technology revolution—that has all the appearances of magic—stands upon the shoulders of the Industrial Revolution.
Around the beginning of the 19th century, humans started making machines to produce goods. Instead of work being done at the rate of human metabolism (we all need to sleep after all), it could now be done at a rate limited only by the technology itself (which, of course, does not need to sleep). Goods could be produced at a scale that was previously unimaginable. And this fundamentally changed every industry and market.
The Industrial Revolution still plays out today, where, for example, in 2023 Apple shipped over 200 million iPhones. Manufacturing that many devices, on that timeframe, to a consistent standard of quality, would simply have been impossible before the industrial revolution.
But even the Industrial Revolution did not grow up out of a vacuum. The ground was fertile from the Financial Revolution.
Around the 15th century, in Italy, merchants developed a new technique of record keeping for their businesses.
It was called double-entry bookkeeping. And it changed the game.
- It enabled entrepreneurs to keep track of more than just the cash in their business. Cash is crucial, but so are non-cash resources like assets and liabilities.
- It gave entrepreneurs the ability to manage complex operations with many employees and lots of different moving parts.
- It helped entrepreneurs keep a hold of a wide range of business dealings. For example, if they had hundreds of accounts owed to them, none would slip through the cracks.
- It meant people could conduct business without having to be personally present to every single transaction.
Along with some other financial innovations of the time, the essential result was that...
- Wealth was no longer tied only to land and agriculture. So all sorts of new trades and crafts started to emerge.
- A business could start from almost nothing and grow to become vast. So entrepreneurs started hustling.
We mostly take this all for granted today—it’s simply how a modern economy works. It seems obvious and inevitable. But it was not always this way.
Double-entry bookkeeping
While most of the modern world is built on the foundation of double-entry bookkeeping, this innovation from over 500 years ago remains inaccessible to most people.
Only a few financial experts wrangle the debits and credits of a business (and tell us that they must balance!), while the vast majority of entrepreneurs are concerned with a thousand other daily tasks. And rightly so, building a business is hard, and it requires a lot of puzzle pieces to be fitted together just right.
Accounting is a tool
There are some moments when accounting becomes an important task for business owners, but it’s usually when they need to pay tax or comply with some sort of regulation or law. Then it’s an emergency that must be dealt with. But double-entry accounting has a lot more to offer for charting a course through the stormy seas of entrepreneurship and business growth.
That’s where stub comes along.
With stub we’ve created a system that takes care of complex accounting, while giving entrepreneurs a host of simple, useful tools for buying, selling and getting things done.
Unlike other options out there, stub automates a business's accounting. It’s an intelligent general ledger that brings it all together with clear, understandable insights to help entrepreneurs make decisions and move forward.
It’s made specially for people who don’t have a background in finance, so it doesn’t need them to know how accounting works or what a financial statement is.
And the result? Our customers often tell us that they didn’t realise what was actually going on in their business until they started using stub.
In that sense, stub is like a lightswitch for a business’s finances.
Why does this matter?
Building a business is hard—there is a lot that you have to get right simply to survive.
In the early days of building a business the challenge is most focused. First, you’ve got to figure out what people are really willing to buy. That seems easy, but what they say they will buy and what they actually drop real, hard dollaroos on, are usually two different things. Second, you’ve got to build enough trust with them so that they buy from you.
There’s art and science and a whole lot of grit needed to make this work. When one misstep can be very costly, stub helps by making financial management effortless. This brings clarity to a business, and when things are clear, decisions get made and the business moves forward.
And small businesses are the key to economic growth. Economic growth seems like a big, untenable problem, but it actually just starts with individuals and communities.
Communities flourish when businesses grow and develop in them. The products that they create, enrich our world with creativity and joy. The services they provide make everything around us work. And they bring people together, creating abundance for others.
When entrepreneurs use their creativity to generate something new and valuable, everyone benefits.
And when more people own a business, they’re empowered to shape and build the world they really want.
At stub our mission is to give entrepreneurs the agency to succeed at building a business. We believe this simple idea has the power to change the world. It begins with better tools. And we’re just getting started.
Credit to Andy Crouch who describes the 3 revolutions in much of his work, and Jane Gleeson-White for her book Double Entry that sheds light on the financial revolution.