Working with any sort of documents, across a wide organization can be a real pain. All of the different formats and various compatibility issues can create a major hassle. However, we just came across a company that looks to drastically simplify this issue. Actual Reports has built a document generation tool that cuts away this uncertainty. We had the chance to ask the Actual Reports Team a few questions about their tools:
Actual Reports
What is Actual Reports
Actual Reports is a document generation and reporting tool for software vendors that eases the creation of any kind of PDF and HTML documents regardless of the programming language.
Who is your product aimed atfor?
We mainly target accounting, ERP, CRM and other software vendors where producing different documents (e.g invoices, reports, quotes etc) is a big part of their clients business. We can also use our own platform to create vertical products for specific markets (e.g printoutdesigner.com)
Why did you build Actual Reports?
More and more developers use different APIs and platforms to make their development process faster. We make it easier to build business applications that need document generation/customization functionality. This means that more developers can ship their products faster with better functionality than before.
How is your product different from what is currently available?
We have experienced and motivate team. We had a pain and we wanted to solve it, but before launching the beta we already had our first paying user. We have the possibility to easily introduce new products built on top of our own platform
Tell us your founding story. Was there an “ah ha” moment?
I’ve developed different web application over seven years and most of the projects had to provide some kind of outputs, printouts and documents (e.g invoices, reports, etc) for the user. Furthermore we needed to provide same output in different formats like PDF, HTML and Excel. We also needed to provide customization options for the users e.g font size, colors, additional text and so on. These options can be represented using different forms, but when ever we the users requested a change in the layout/placement we needed to hardcode output template for specific user and this had to be done for all different formats. There had to be a better option to provide the customization options for the user and automatically generate PDF, HTML and Excel files using the same template (modified by the user). That is how Actual Reports was born.
Actual Reports makes life easier for developers and software vendors as we implement the entire document template editing and also the generation process to different formats. Software vendors can work on their core product and let us take care of the output generation process.
We also build different vertical products on top of our own platform. For example Printout Designer (printoutdesigner.com) is a invoice/packing slip/label designer and printer for online retailers who use different ecommerce platforms.
Tell us about your founding team and their backgrounds.
Tanel Tähepõld – 7+ years experience in developing web applications. Helped several startups build their products. Martin Hiiemaa – 10+ years experience in finance and running different companies.
What’s the next step? What are your short-term goals?
Our next milestone is to release new editor that adds a lot of new functionality that makes the design process even easier and more convenient. Current customers really like the editor as it is very flexible and easy to use. We also want to scale the team and to do this we need to raise money from investors.
