Introducing Tebi

It’s been more than two years since we devised this pretty crazy idea and named it “Tebi”. In that time, we’ve been busy developing the product in close cooperation with a number of local business owners, constantly adding new features while onboarding early access customers. Now seems the right time to proudly introduce the all new, all-in-one Tebi platform.

At its current stage, Tebi is comprised of three foundational components that are core to starting and running a business:

1. Accounting backbone

2. Point of sale (POS)

3. Payments

More often than not, small business owners use separate products for each of the above features. We built Tebi as an integrated platform for a couple of reasons. First of all, to save business owners the headache of buying several different products, paying for the integrations between them, and hoping it all works out.

Secondly, we know that when all these mission-critical components are built into one platform, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Integrating payments in the POS means you can complete a transaction quickly and seamlessly and you know exactly how much cash will be sitting in the register at the end of the shift. When it comes to insights: you have all the data you need in real-time (no lag) and in full color (no lost data points).

Tebi isn’t a pay-per-feature toolbox: it’s a robust platform that includes all the necessary tools to run a business, and designed to save business owners as much time and money as possible. So all the features you see here are included regardless of whether you have a free membership, or are paying to use additional devices.

Accounting

The bottom line in running a business is literally the bottom line. It’s about one simple binary: are you flying up, or flying down? That’s why we are introducing a daily Profit and Loss statement that will tell you if you made money or lost money at the end of each day. This simple representation of business success, to us, is the mother of all metrics — all the choices you make for your business, all the external factors you’ll be dealing with, every single aspect boils down to that one simple question: up or down? We think accounting is so important, we even made it part of our logo (see the plus-minus symbol up there?).

Some people don’t think accounting is a very exciting topic, but we do! It is essential to any business, big or small. Tebi is in fact, at its coriest core, an accounting system, and it’s not a coincidence we call our merchant’s accounts ‘ledgers’. Every sale you make is immediately logged to the right account, with double entry journals cataloguing every detail — from taxes to inventory movements to margins. Inside your ledger we’re constantly adding and subtracting, calculating the right VAT or sales tax and making sure you have the right numbers at hand at any time, but especially when tax season rolls around.

In short: accounting is Tebi’s engine, not simply a coat of paint. And with it, we’re working to help merchants create truly robust businesses, where they have tools to locate and handle the different challenges they may face.

Point of Sale (POS)

Most businesses could not function without some form of point of sale (POS) system. A POS takes care of the basics of running a business: taking orders and creating invoices for customers. If you were operating a very simple business with few products, a very bare-bones point of sale might do the trick. But assuming you have more than a few items with more than a few variations to offer, you are probably looking for something beefier.

Our POS is chock-full of features but still simple to use. Some notable features include:

• Easily add discounts and notes to any product while you sell

• Adjust orders with product modifiers

• Customer-facing display to show what is being ordered in real-time

• Customize your sales screen to take orders how you want

• Fully functional on mobile devices

• Keeps working when the internet fails, promptly syncs when you get back online

• Runs on (Android) payment terminals

• Runs on Android devices or simply on payment terminals

• Smooth out the back of house with a kitchen display system (KDS)

Tebi Payments

Our goal is to bring powerful tools at a low price point to businesses around the world. That goal extends to Tebi Payments. We are proud to offer small merchants a transaction fee for debit and credit cards that would normally only be available to larger companies.

Payments key features:

• Keep your cash flow close with quick payouts

• Keep taking payments when the WiFi fails

• Help retain staff with features to boost tips on the terminal

• Syncs straight back to the POS (and accounting) for quicker shift reconciliation

About our pricing strategy

You might have noticed that the pricing for the Tebi platform differs from most other companies that provide business tooling, in both its low price point and its success-based philosophy. There are three reasons for this.

First of all, simplicity. For the Tebi software, we have a free membership plan for the smallest businesses (the ones who generate less than €10k in monthly revenue), and we charge €20/month per bracket of €10k after that. That’s it. There’s no catch, and everyone can easily calculate much they’ll be billed for Tebi based on their expected monthly revenue. You’ll be billed less for slow months, which seems only fair. We feel this success-based model keeps Tebi accessible to all business sizes without putting limitations on how they run their business, such as the number of devices they can use.

Secondly, our pricing is cost-based. We charge a bit more if you make more money, because typically the revenue you bring in says something about the number of transactions processed by our servers, and thus our costs for server capacity.

Third of all, our low price point has a lot to do with our aim to operate on a large scale. We are building software that empowers as many merchants as we can reach. This means our product will be mostly “self-service”, ie. without personal support programs. We’re working on detailed documentation and user guides, but Tebi is explicitly not for merchants who need 24/7 support. That said, our aim is to develop a platform of such high quality and intuitive ease that you won’t need the handholding. Anyone with a decent internet connection who is able to install an app, is able to use Tebi to run their business.