This year’s CommBank Young Hero Awards shines the spotlight on 10 outstanding business leaders from across Australia. These young entrepreneurs, aged 35 and under, are making a positive impact on Australia’s business market while pushing the boundaries of their respective industries. Let’s take a closer look at these trailblazing businesses and the remarkable founders that run them. Karan Anand, Chief Strategy Officer & Managing Director, Australia at Hnry shares insights into their business’s success and why they were awarded CommBank Young Hero Awards 2023: Innovator of the Year.
Most rewarding experience of running your business?
Perhaps Hnry’s greatest achievement to date is how we’re improving the productive capacity of Australia’s one-and-a-half million sole traders. A recent independent study conducted by Resolve Strategic demonstrated that sole traders are spending seven hours a week on tax and financial admin, going up to nine hours for healthcare workers and ten hours for tradies. They are also spending over $300 a month on tax and financial admin costs.
In the same study, Resolve Strategic was able to identify that sole traders using Hnry only spent two hours on tax and financial admin and only around $100 per month on costs, a drastic saving on both fronts.
What makes your business innovative compared to competitors?
Hnry is a completely innovative service with no real comparators around the world. Our innovation comes from the fact that we integrate three distinct modules – payments, accounting software and accounting. In and of themselves, these are three discrete multi-billion dollar industries that we house in one elegant solution, tailored to a specific customer segment.
Hnry combines all of these seamlessly and has designed them around the needs of a largely unserved segment: sole traders.
I think our innovation stands out for three reasons. Firstly, we are a service as a software. Unlike other tech startups that lead with their software in a traditional “software as a service” model, we consider Hnry a “service as a software”. With Hnry on your side, you have access to in-house tax experts so you never have to worry about tax and compliance again. The underlying software of Hnry makes it easier for independent earners to handle their financial obligations, while the people behind Hnry ensure that their needs are met and that they can be the best they can be at what they do.
Secondly, our proprietary automation stands out. Hnry uses cutting-edge automation to calculate, pay and file all tax obligations, before immediately passing on what the customer gets to keep. Not only have we automated and simplified tax payments, ensuring that everyone who uses Hnry is tax compliant, but we’ve also enabled people to focus on the things that matter most to them.
Lastly, we drive disruptive innovation from outside the industry. Hnry has not been created by the industry itself; like any great disruption, it comes from outside, from those that see a complacent and bloated industry ripe for change. While sustaining innovators make a better product and take customers away from the competition, such as Apple iPhone, disruptive innovators make a product accessible to a new market using technology to reduce costs and meet the needs of new customer segments. Disruptive innovation manifests through the business model of Hnry as we are using proprietary technology to revolutionise the market by providing a much more affordable solution for people that were not previously considered target customers of accountants or accounting software companies.
How has your innovative approach to business been beneficial to your customers?
Before Hnry, independent earners worldwide have been mostly ignored by other emerging and established solutions in favour of solving problems for the enterprise, or for the accountant. Hnry brings genuine value, time-saving and peace of mind for the individual, as well as removing the need for them to have to operate across multiple software or service providers.
The independently conducted Hnry sole trader pulse identified that by using Hnry customers saved seven hours a week. Hnry has been dubbed the individual’s ‘self-employment in a box’. With Hnry, our customers can use financial services such as sending unlimited quotes and invoices, accepting payments via different methods, having their tax rate automatically calculated by Hnry’s proprietary algorithm, having all their taxes including GST, Income Tax, Medicare Levy, Student Loans automatically paid to the ATO or IRD and much more.
By: Alyssa Herr, Editor
