Built for the people who actually run small businesses — not for the accountants who audit them. Track income, track expenses, see profit, file tax. Done. No chart of accounts. No journal entries. No 47-tab dashboard. Just numbers that make sense, in a tap.
You opened QuickBooks once. You closed it within ninety seconds. So did everyone else who has ever run a small business and just wanted to know "did I make money this month?".
QuickBooks, Xero, Tally, Zoho Books — they're all spectacular pieces of software. They handle multi-entity consolidation, foreign-currency hedging, deferred revenue recognition and accrual-basis general ledgers across nineteen tax jurisdictions. They are, genuinely, brilliant.
They are also, equally, useless to the woman who runs the corner grocery in Mohammadpur. Or the freelance designer in Doha who invoices six clients a month. Or the cousin running a restaurant in Sylhet who just wants to know how much VAT to pay this quarter. These tools demand that you first understand double-entry bookkeeping, then chart-of-accounts hierarchies, then how to map a credit-card receipt to a contra-asset journal entry.
For ninety-five percent of small business owners on Earth, that's a tax — a cognitive tax — they should never have had to pay. They didn't get into business to learn accounting. They got into business to sell something they love.
So they did what any reasonable human would do: they went back to a paper diary. Or a WhatsApp group with their cousin who's "good with numbers". Or an Excel sheet that breaks every quarter. Or — most often — they simply stopped tracking, hoped for the best, and discovered the truth only when the tax notice arrived.
What if accounting software felt like a calculator, not a cockpit?
A shop owner shouldn't need to read a textbook to know if she made money this month. She should open one app, see one number, and know. That's the bar. If we can't hit that bar, we shouldn't ship the product. Countly is what happens when you build accounting software for the person, not the profession.
Kashim Uddin Masum
Founder & Chairman · Dream Group · Est. 2011
Countly's design brief was the shortest brief in Dream Group history. It was four words long: "For the shop owner." That single phrase — taped to the wall of the engineering room in Banani for two years — has rejected more feature requests than any product manager ever could.
Want to add a chart-of-accounts builder? Doesn't help the shop owner. Cut it. Want to add a multi-entity consolidation module? Doesn't help the shop owner. Cut it. Want to add SSO and SAML? Doesn't help the shop owner. Cut it.
What's left is a product that does five things — and only five things — extraordinarily well: record income, record expense, see profit, prepare tax, share a report. Everything else has been deliberately, ruthlessly, removed.
The result is accounting software a fifteen-year-old can teach her father to use in under three minutes. We've watched it happen in our user-research sessions, again and again. That's the bar. That's the entire product.
Not fifty things done badly. Five things, designed and redesigned until each one is a single tap.
Snap the receipt or type the amount. Countly handles the categorization, the date, the tax bucket. No journal entries. No debits and credits. Just "money came in".
Rent, stock, salary, utility, transport. Pre-built categories that match how a real small business spends. Add custom ones in two taps if you need them.
Open the app. See this month's profit. Last month's profit. This year's profit. One number per period. Drill down only if you want to. Most don't need to.
Bangladesh VAT, Qatar VAT, BIR, Income Tax, Trade License renewal — pre-formatted PDFs for your accountant or for direct filing. End-of-year is a 20-minute job.
BDT, QAR, AED, SAR, USD, EUR — live FX, automatic conversion. For freelancers and exporters who get paid in three currencies and still want one profit number.
One-tap export to your CA, your tax lawyer, your business partner. Read-only PDF or full data export. They'll thank you. So will you, next April.
QuickBooks, Xero and Tally are extraordinary. They're also extraordinarily wrong for ninety-five percent of small businesses. Here's the honest comparison.
| Feature | QuickBooks | Xero | Tally | Countly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Designed for | Accountants | Accountants | Accountants | Shop owners |
| Starting price | $30/mo | $15/mo | ~$200 one-time | Free forever |
| Time to record a sale | ~2 min | ~90 sec | ~2 min | ~10 seconds |
| Setup help required | Yes — ProAdvisor | Yes — Partner | Yes — CA | None |
| Bengali UI | No | No | Partial | Native |
| Bangladesh VAT export | No | No | Yes — complex | One tap |
| Mobile-first design | Companion app | Companion app | Desktop-bound | Yes — mobile-first |
No setup fee. No annual contract. No "talk to sales". Two plans, both honest.
$0/month
Everything a one-person business needs. Forever. No credit card, no trial timer, no upsell wall.
$6/month
For shops, restaurants and small companies with 2–10 staff. Multi-user, accountant access, integrations.
Download. Open. Record your first sale. That's the entire onboarding. No accountant. No tutorial. No credit card. Just numbers that make sense, finally.
Countly is one of thirteen ventures inside Dream Group. Here are three more from the same studio.
AI / Productivity
Affordable, beautifully-designed AI tools for everyone — chat, RAG, image and voice in Bengali, English and Arabic.
Fintech / Wallet
Your wallet, gone digital. Save, send, receive and track — built for the smartphone-first generation.
Travel / SaaS
All-in-one operations platform for travel agencies — visas, packages, tickets and accounting in one calm interface.