18-03-2019

Why we started with ROOV? The story!

When I bought a house several years ago I bought something that wasn’t good. The house needed a lot of repairs and there was no overview what happened in the last years.

I started an analysis and tried to gather as many documents as possible:

  • About the roof: who did the last repairs?
  • Regarding the heating: was it duly revised?
  • When was the last time the bathroom was renovated and what did it include?
  • Does the electricity comply with security requirements?
  • Any house-related guarantees still running?

My first reaction? If you have a car-pass when you buy a second-hand car, shouldn't you have a house-pass to retrace the history of a house? All you need to buy real estate with confidence!

    To strip or not to strip?

    After a few months, my wife and I realised that the house was up to more than just a facelift. We had to choose between an entire renovation or a complete strip and rebuild. We finally decided to rebuild an entirely new house. What a pain to get the building permit, and the paperwork mountain started growing…

    • Quotations
    • Invoices
    • Permits
    • Warrantees
    • Corrections of invoices
    • Pictures

    How did we tackle this administrative burden?

    • We put all the documents into folders, locked away in our brand-new cabinets.
    • We made a construction budget based on the architect's estimation, which we exceeded with extra costs that popped up for each correction or addition.
    • We made various excel sheets to keep an overview, but none led to a 100% correct budget.

    Eventually, we could not say for sure what was the total cost of our new house.

    Problems have solutions

    As a good housefather  I started thinking about how to better get organised:

    • Where to archive all the documents related to the house?
    • How to retrace these documents easily?
    • How to get a better cost overview?

    These reflections led to action and the idea to put everything together in an easy personal finance and administration app!

    You're not alone

    As we did thorough research, we found many people with the same problems. Just like me, they also struggled with their personal finance control. Do you exactly know how much you spend every month and on what? Do you realise how much you spend on new clothing? On restaurants? On mobile consumption? There was a clear need for an online personal finance and administration tool, combining document archiving, expense control, analytic and optimisation tools. And we started developing the foundations for ROOV.

    All-in personal finance

    We solve many problems in 1 independent app:

    • A safe digital archive where you can easily retrace all your documents and share them with others.
    • A tool that shows an overview and the evolution of all your expenses
    • All your accounts in 1 overview

    Have fun using our app!

    Frédéric Vandenhende

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