Build your own accounting software: why we're starting Point Invoicing from scratch

Build your own accounting software the way most companies do, and you spend two years building everything — then launch with a big-bang release nobody trusts yet. We're doing the opposite.

Last week we made a call that reshaped our whole roadmap: instead of releasing Point as one complete ERP, we'll ship it one tiny app at a time under the name Point Solutions. The first one is Point Invoicing — small-business invoicing at $4.99/month for up to 3 users, with a 14-day free trial and no card required.

This post is why.

Build your own accounting software on your own ledger, not someone else's

The full Point ERP currently runs on Odoo's accounting engine. That's fine as a starting point — but Odoo's code is LGPL-licensed, and we want Point's future to be ours: an independent ledger we control, understand line by line, and can extend without license strings attached.

So Point Invoicing will run on our own ledger, written fresh, on the same stack that powers our website: Next.js, Cloudflare Workers, and D1. No Odoo. No copied code — we've committed to learning patterns from permissively licensed code and writing our own engine.

That sounds slower. It isn't. A focused ledger that only needs to do invoicing — customers, invoices, payments, taxes — is weeks of careful work, not years. The giant ERP got big by accumulating decades of scope. We don't need decades of scope to get one business paid.

Build your own accounting software one wedge at a time

There's a name for this strategy: a wedge. Instead of fighting established ERPs on every front, you pick one painful, narrow job and do it better than anyone.

Invoicing is the wedge because it's the job every business does every week, and it's where generic tools fall short of reality:

• Bilingual invoices. Point Invoicing produces invoices in English and Arabic — the way Gulf businesses actually trade.
• ZATCA-aware fields. Saudi Arabia's e-invoicing rules shape what an invoice must contain. We'll build for that reality from day one instead of bolting it on later.
• Pricing people can reason about. $4.99/month for up to 3 users. A founding-tier structure rewards early users the same way our Point waitlist does. No per-invoice fees, no seat-counting anxiety.

The rule we've set for ourselves is strict: 10 paying users before module two (Expenses). If Point Invoicing can't find 10 businesses willing to pay $4.99 a month, that's the market telling us something — and we'd rather hear it now than after building a payroll module nobody asked for.

Build your own accounting software in public

This blog exists because we're building in the open. That means no fake metrics ("trusted by 10,000 businesses"), no invented customers, no launch theater. The Point waitlist counter shows the real count. When Point Invoicing has one paying user, we'll say one. When it has ten, we'll say ten and start building Expenses.

Building in public also means saying the quiet part out loud: we're a two-person-sized company competing with vendors that have thousands of employees. Our advantage isn't scale — it's that we can ship a narrow tool fast, price it aggressively, and stay honest about what it is and isn't. That honesty is the whole business principle. We'll survive through being real.

What Point Invoicing is (and isn't)

It is: a simple way for a small business to create proper invoices, track who's paid, and keep the tax fields right — on a ledger we own.

It isn't: a full ERP. It won't do payroll, inventory, or HR. Point Invoicing doesn't try to replace your accounting system; it handles the one job where getting paid late costs you real money.

Later modules — Expenses, then the rest — merge into the same ledger. Each one has to earn its existence the same way: ten paying users, then build.

The lesson for anyone else starting out

If you're thinking about building your own accounting software, here's our honest take: don't start with accounting. Start with the one job your future users do most often, make it excellent, and grow the ledger underneath it. The accounting engine you need in month one is a tenth of the engine you think you need. Scope is the most expensive thing you'll ever build.

We're learning this by doing it. Watch us get it wrong in the open, fix it, and ship.

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Curious about Point? Join the waitlist at tetramlabs.com — you'll hear about Point Invoicing first, and founding spots (1–100 get 30% off for two years) are claimed by signup order.