Why we built involy.

ThinkOpen is a managed IT and cybersecurity firm. We set up infrastructure, harden security posture, migrate companies to the cloud, and build the integrations that keep modern businesses running. That is what it says on the website, and it is true.

What it does not say is that for years we also watched our clients struggle with their finances. Not because they were reckless or irresponsible — because the tools available to them were designed for someone else entirely.

The client who almost missed payroll

A few years ago, one of our clients — a two-person engineering consultancy — nearly missed payroll for their contractor. Not because the money was not there. Because they did not know the money was there.

They were using QuickBooks. They had $4,200 in their checking account. They had $22,000 in outstanding invoices — one of which was two weeks away from clearing, another of which was already overdue from a client who historically paid late but always paid. QuickBooks showed them their cash balance. It had no opinion on the invoices. So they saw $4,200 and panicked.

We helped them run the numbers manually. Within a week, $18,500 had landed. They were fine. But they had spent a very stressful two weeks operating on incomplete information — information that their $200-a-month accounting software technically had access to, but never surfaced in a useful way.

I kept thinking about that. The data was there. The software just was not designed to answer the right question.

The accountant-shaped hole in every money app

Here is what I came to understand over years of working with self-employed clients: every mainstream financial tool was built with an accountant at the center. Not a business owner. Not a consultant or contractor or freelance electrician. An accountant.

QuickBooks assumes you want to reconcile accounts and manage a chart of accounts and run a trial balance. FreshBooks is better at invoicing but still thinks in terms of accounting periods and GL codes. YNAB is great if you get direct deposit every two weeks and want help allocating it — but it budgets only what is in the bank, which for the self-employed is always the wrong number.

The self-employed do not want to become accountants. They want to know: can I afford this? When do I need to pay taxes? Which client is late? Am I making money? Those are not hard questions. They are just questions that the existing tools refuse to answer directly.

What we saw, again and again

We worked with property managers who did not know they owed quarterly estimated taxes until they got a penalty notice. We worked with contractors who had no system for tracking 1099 subcontractors, which created real exposure at tax time. We worked with consultants who were genuinely uncertain whether their business was profitable — not because the data did not exist, but because their tools required too much work to surface it.

One client — a freelance engineer who billed $280,000 a year — was using a spreadsheet. He was good at his job and thoughtful about his business. The spreadsheet worked fine until it did not: a bad quarter, a late-paying client, and an unexpected tax bill collided, and suddenly the spreadsheet was not enough to navigate it. He needed a tool that thought the way he thought — in terms of projects and invoices and clients, not debits and credits.

The decision

In 2024, I decided to build the tool I kept wishing existed for our clients. Not another invoicing add-on. Not another budgeting app with a self-employed mode bolted on. A money app designed from the ground up for how independent people actually earn.

The core bet is simple: for the self-employed, income is not just what is in the bank. It is what is in the bank plus the invoices you are legitimately owed. Build the budget around that number — weighted by collection history, with an automatic tax reserve, surfaced in plain English — and you have something genuinely useful. Build the invoicing and proposals and AI accountant on top of the same data model, and you have one app that can answer every financial question a self-employed person actually asks.

Because we are a cybersecurity firm, security was never an afterthought. involy was designed with zero-trust architecture, least-privilege data access, and the same offense-informed defense mindset we apply to every client engagement. Your financial data is not sold. It is not used to train models. It is yours.

Who it is for

There are more than 30 million self-employed Americans. Engineers, consultants, electricians, contractors, property managers, designers, therapists, photographers. People who are excellent at what they do and did not sign up to become bookkeepers. People who deserve a money app that meets them where they are — not where an accountant is.

That is who involy is for. That is why we built it.

If you are self-employed and you have ever felt like your financial tools were designed for someone else, they probably were. involy was designed for you.

involy is currently in early access. We are onboarding a small group of self-employed people to shape the product before a wider launch. Join the list if you want in. — The involy team