Bishal Shrestha

I've been running my own businesses since I was in my early twenties. Digital marketing agency, consulting, web development, you name it. And like every small business owner in Australia, I lived in Google Sheets.

Client contacts in one spreadsheet. Invoices in another. Quotes copy-pasted from old emails. Bookings tracked in my calendar with reminders I'd forget to set. Expenses stuffed in a shoebox until my accountant started chasing me. I told myself it was “good enough”, until tax time proved me wrong, every single year.

Come BAS season, I'd spend entire weekends reconciling numbers that didn't add up. Missing receipts. Invoices I forgot to record. GST calculations I had to double-check line by line. My accountant would send back queries and I'd scramble through months of disorganised records trying to find answers. It was stressful, expensive, and completely avoidable.

Then I started consulting for other small businesses, over 200 of them across Australia. Plumbers in Melbourne's west, restaurant owners in the CBD, salon operators in Sydney, freelance designers across the country. Every single one had the same story. They were paying for 6 different tools that didn't talk to each other. Xero for accounting. HubSpot or a spreadsheet for CRM. Calendly for bookings. Mailchimp for email. Square for POS. Each with its own login, its own monthly bill, and its own learning curve.

The total cost? Priced at each vendor’s own cheapest published plan, Xero, HubSpot and Calendly alone come to $37/mo + US$30/mo. Mailchimp publishes no ongoing rate at all, and Square’s till is free until you take a card, when its own published take-rate starts. Most of them bill per seat, so the bill climbs with the team rather than staying put. Vendor prices verified 2 August 2026. And come tax time, they were all doing exactly what I used to do, panicking over missing records and hoping for the best.

I knew there had to be a better way. Not a bloated enterprise platform dumbed down for small business, but something built from scratch for the way Australian businesses actually operate. Something that handles invoicing, CRM, bookings, accounting, and marketing in one book, with one login, and makes BAS time a matter of checking figures the system already assembled, rather than reconstructing a quarter from receipts.

That's OneBookPlus. It's the tool I wished existed when I was running my own businesses and losing weekends to spreadsheets. Now it does.