European small businesses spend billions every year on manual admin work.
They pay for bookkeeping, VAT returns, annual accounts, corporate tax filings, payroll coordination, management reporting, and payment reconciliation. On top of that, they spend hours every week, month, and quarter chasing documents, invoices, bills, and receipts, just so they can be entered manually into accounting software.
Much of this work is necessary. But too often, it only produces financial truth after the fact: A month late, a quarter late, or sometimes even a year late.
That means businesses are compliant, but not in control.
The problem is especially painful in Europe. Each country has its own tax rules, accounting standards, filing requirements, e-invoicing timelines, VAT processes, and local expectations. A finance process that works in the Netherlands does not automatically work in Germany, France, Spain, or the UK.
KfW estimated that German SMEs alone spend around 1.5 billion working hours each year complying with legal requirements, equal to roughly €61 billion in labour costs. Tax, documentation, and accounting obligations are among the most burdensome areas. Extrapolated across Europe and the UK, this represents a huge economic cost.
We experienced this ourselves.
At Sprinque, our previous company, we had a fractional CFO, a part-time financial controller, an external accountant using Exact, and an internal team member spending half his time keeping the books up to date.
We were constantly chasing receipts, invoices, statements, reconciliations, and batch payments. Our internal finance admin cost around €50k per year. External software, tools, and outsourced services cost another €90k per year. We had delayed reporting, basic runway visibility, and enough coordination to stay compliant. But we did not have a live financial system that helped us make better decisions every day.
We had compliance, not control.
That is why we are building Thred.
We are on a mission to give every business access to a world-class finance team, an agentic finance team.
We start with bookkeeping because everything depends on trusted books. If the books are not current, reporting is unreliable. Forecasting is unreliable. Tax planning is unreliable. Advice is unreliable. And business decisions can be plain wrong.
So we first builds the accounting backbone: A live financial truth layer.
Thred connects to bank accounts, inboxes, payment processors, commerce platforms, and document channels like Gmail, Outlook, WhatsApp, and Slack. It collects invoices, receipts, statements, and transaction data automatically. It categorises, reconciles, and posts transactions continuously. When something is missing or requires judgment, it flags the exception immediately.
From there, compliance becomes much lighter. VAT returns can be prepared from live books. Annual accounts and corporate tax filings can be built from the same financial layer. Reporting is no longer a monthly exercise. Forecasts, cash visibility, and financial questions can be answered on demand.
The goal is not another dashboard.
The goal is to take work off the founder’s plate, reduce the cost of finance admin, and make sure the business always knows where it stands.
On top of that financial layer sits an AI financial assistant that lets business owners ask questions in plain language and get answers traced back to the underlying transactions. Furthermore, this agent proactively communicates with the business to create awareness for current or upcoming issues, such as an upcoming cash flow crunch, and to recommend solutions.
Local, human accounting and finance experts remain essential. Their knowledge of local rules, edge cases, filing requirements, and regulatory nuance is what makes automation reliable in each market. Thred uses that expertise to make the system smarter over time.
We believe the future of SME finance in Europe is not a better spreadsheet, a prettier dashboard, or another accounting software that still requires manual admin work.
It is a finance function that runs continuously in the background, adapted to local rules, with human expertise where it matters.
That is Thred.
If you would like to see how it works, you can schedule a demo here.
