01 · Startup · Fintech
Kept
The finance operating system for small businesses.
A startup I'm building. Kept connects a small business's bank accounts, records every transaction and expense, sends invoices, pays staff and suppliers, and keeps the books, so a business without a finance team still knows exactly where its money is.
- Role
- Founder, design + engineering
- Timeline
- Oct 2026 – now
- Team
- Solo
- Stack
- Next.js 16, Postgres, Paystack
The problem
Most small businesses don't have a finance team. The owner is the accountant, and the money lives across bank apps, WhatsApp chats, an Excel file and a Google Sheet, updated by hand when someone remembers. That costs them twice: hours every week, and books nobody can rely on when they need a loan.
- Small businesses are most of the economy. In Nigeria, micro, small and medium enterprises are 96.9% of businesses, 87.9% of jobs and about 46% of GDP.
- Credit follows records. Fewer than one in twenty Nigerian small businesses can get a bank loan, and poor record keeping is one of the reasons lenders keep giving.
- The records already exist, they're just scattered: in bank alerts, WhatsApp messages and spreadsheets. So Kept doesn't ask owners to learn accounting software. It pulls from where the money already moves and asks the owner to confirm.
Sources: NBS/SMEDAN MSME survey 2021 (via PwC) · World Bank FINCLUDE, Dec 2025 (via Leadership) · IFC on Nigeria's SME finance gap (via BusinessDay)
01
Every account, one picture
Connect the business's bank accounts once and Kept shows the real position: the balance across banks, money in, money out and what's still on its way. No more opening three banking apps to answer "how much do we have?"
02
Books that keep themselves
Every transaction comes in from the bank with a suggested category and, where it can, a match to an invoice ("the invoice number is in the bank's description"). Nothing goes into the books until the owner confirms, so they stay accurate without anyone retyping a statement at month end.
Receipts, photos, PDFs and voice notes can be dropped in too; Keeper reads them and drafts the entry.
03
Run it from WhatsApp
Small businesses already sell and get paid over WhatsApp, so Kept works there. An owner can message "Bill Ada 45k for 3 bags of rice" and get back an invoice with a pay link; when it's paid, the sale lands in their records and everyone on the team gets a message.
04
Pay people without the bank portal
Payroll and supplier payments start from the spreadsheet owners already keep. Kept checks every account number with the bank and matches the name before a kobo moves, flags duplicates and outliers, and only pays after a person approves. Statuses come back into the sheet by themselves.
05
An analyst that never moves money
Keeper runs on Claude, connected to Paystack's MCP server. It spots money owed and money at risk, answers questions about the business, edits sheets and drafts payment runs, but it can never send money. AI drafts, humans approve: that line was the first product decision.
What I built
- 4
- ways in: banks, WhatsApp, Excel, Zoho
- 1 click
- to a full demo, no sign-up
- 60+
- spreadsheet and money formulas
- Bank connections and balances, a ledger that suggests categories and matches, receipt and voice-note reading
- Invoices by email and WhatsApp with pay links; billing by chat message
- Payouts on Paystack Transfers with bank verification, name matching, approvals and webhook reconciliation
- Keeper on Claude with Paystack's MCP server, limited to reads and drafts
- Plain Postgres (no ORM), Better Auth, Excel/Google Sheets/Zoho Books import, a one-click demo with no sign-up
Next project
Becky
Purposeful love that feels like home.
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