About

About Smart Abacus

Smart Abacus buys and runs bookkeeping practices in the South East of England. We started it because we kept seeing the same thing: good practices, loyal clients, capable people – and owners spending their evenings on work a modern system should do for them.

We’re a small team who do the work ourselves. When we say we’ll modernise a practice, that means Lisa and James rolling their sleeves up, not a consultant with a slide deck.

Lisa Hunter, Chief Executive

Lisa runs Smart Abacus day to day and is the person you’ll deal with from first call to completion.

She’s a CIMA- and AAT-qualified accountant.

Before that she spent five years on the board of the Send For Help Group as Finance Director and then Chief Financial Officer, running a fifteen-strong finance team across three trading companies with around £16m of turnover, and working on every acquisition the group made in the UK and abroad. Since 2022 she has been a chief executive: she founded Safer Pet, bought and integrated several small lost-and-found businesses into it, and led Pet Microchip Services, one of the UK’s largest microchip registration groups, to its sale in 2024. She also runs Petkey, one of the largest pet microchip registries in the United States.

She’s based in Surrey.

lisa@smartabacus.co.uk

James Murray, Chairman

James founded Smart Abacus and is the investor behind it. He has been starting, buying and building businesses for more than twenty years.

He founded the Send For Help Group in 2010 and, by acquiring Skyguard, Guardian24 and Peoplesafe, built it into the UK’s largest lone-worker protection provider, with more than 150,000 subscribers and three consecutive years in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100. He then built Pet Microchip Services into one of the UK’s largest microchip registration groups and sold it to Identibase in 2024, and is now owner and chairman of Petkey, one of the largest pet microchip databases in the United States. His first business, an online retailer he started in 2004, was sold in 2009.

At Smart Abacus he does the modernisation work himself: moving practices onto Xero and building the automation that takes the data entry out of the day.

He’s based in Surrey.

We've done this before, together

James and Lisa have worked together since 2015: first at Send For Help, where Lisa was Finance Director and then CFO; then at Pet Microchip Services; then at Petkey. Every acquisition along the way – Guardian24, Peoplesafe, the lost-and-found businesses, Petkey itself – was a business someone else had built, bought to be run and grown, not stripped. Smart Abacus is the same idea applied to bookkeeping, which is the world Lisa trained in.

What we believe

The owner's reputation is the asset.

Everything else – software, processes, even the office – can be improved. Trust can’t be bought, so we protect it.

Automation should free people, not replace the relationship.

Clients want a person who knows their business. Our job is to give that person better tools.

Say the number early.

The worst part of selling a business is uncertainty. We’d rather tell you what we’d pay in week two than in month four.