How Kiwii was born

Hi. Before KiwiiApp, our entrepreneurial path took us first into wholesale with a sales team, then into several hospitality businesses, and while Kiwii was taking shape we were running four beauty centres with more than twenty people on the payroll at our peak.

If you run a business with employees you know how it goes: the good part is serving customers, growing the team, opening another location. The ugly part starts when you close the door and the admin work begins. That is what killed our weekends for years. And, honestly, that is why Kiwii exists.

A timeline of our frustration

1. Paper time sheets

We started like everyone else: a sheet on the wall, employees signed in and out, we collected the papers at the end of the month and... well, let's not get into what happened with some people's illegible handwriting. Or the sheet that mysteriously "disappeared" precisely the week the overtime piled up.

2. The fingerprint machine

We bought a "professional" fingerprint system. It worked fine for a while. Until an inspection came and we needed two years of clock-in records. The machine cheerfully returned the last year and a half. The rest? "It gets overwritten automatically", according to the manufacturer. Fine.

3. Payslips: the infinite loop

Every month, without exception:

1. Print twenty-something payslips, double-sided.
2. Hand them out, location by location.
3. Chase people down to get them signed.
4. Scan every single one.
5. Email them to the accounting firm.
6. File the originals in a binder we never opened again.
7. One month later: "Hey, I lost my payslip, can you send it again?". And the whole chain starts over.

Multiply that by twenty-something employees and twelve months a year. Do the math.

4. Invoices, or the quarterly treasure hunt

Supplier receipts in trouser pockets. PDF invoices in one inbox. Others in the manager's. Others on paper pinned to a corkboard. Business cards with "I'll send you the invoice" scribbled on the back. Every quarter the accounting firm wrote to us: "Send us this quarter's invoices". And the hunt began.

Every quarter we ended up with a pile of paper, blurry photos on WhatsApp and lost conversations. And always, without fail, some invoice showed up late or never showed up at all.

6. Signatures, signatures and more signatures

Holiday request: signature. PPE handover: signature. Shift agreement: signature. Overtime confirmation: signature. Us chasing people around the shop with a pen, them saying "later, later". And later never came.

7. Orders between locations (pure chaos)

We had locations ordering goods via WhatsApp. Others by email. Others called on the phone. And others simply left it scribbled on a piece of paper next to the cash register hoping someone would see it. To draw up a weekly picture of what was missing where, you had to trawl through four different channels. It was no longer a business owner's job — it was detective work.

The click

One Saturday afternoon, after spending the whole morning sorting invoices on the living-room floor, we sat down to do the math. Not money — hours. We added up how much time per week all this manual admin was eating. The number was brutal.

We had a very obvious thought: if we have this problem, so do thousands of small business owners in Spain in exactly the same situation. Hospitality, beauty, retail, workshops, clinics. All with shifts. All chasing payslips. All hunting for invoices at 11 p.m. on a Sunday.

The big software (Factorial, Sesame, Personio) is built for consulting offices with fixed hours — not for a restaurant with three rotating shifts and employees coming and going every month. And the ones that claimed to be built for small businesses were expensive, complicated, or required installing yet another app our employees were never going to open.

But there was one thing ALL our employees already had installed and opened a hundred times a day: WhatsApp.

And so Kiwii was born

Málaga, 2025. The starting question was simple: what if the company's operating system were WhatsApp for the employee, and a web dashboard for the boss?

Today with Kiwii:

• Clock-ins happen by typing "in" on WhatsApp. Or from the app. Or from the browser. Or from a smartwatch. A tamper-proof record with geolocation and blockchain traceability. Compliant with RD-ley 8/2019. And, above all, the next inspection won't catch us with only a year and a half of records — everything is safe from day one.
• Payslips are signed digitally from the phone. Employees always have them available in their personal area. Never again the classic "I lost my payslip, can you send it again?".
• Invoices are uploaded with a photo on WhatsApp. The AI reads them, classifies them and files them. Every quarter the accounting firm downloads them already labelled and sorted. No paper hunts, no digging through chats.
• VERI*FACTU is built into Kiwii as a module. Without paying anyone five thousand euros on the side.
• Signatures for time off, PPE, shift agreements: a link to the employee's phone, sign with a finger, filed automatically. Zero paper, zero chasing.
• Orders between locations: all through the same channel, with a photo of the delivery note when goods arrive, automatic stock control. Goodbye to juggling four different channels in your head.

Who we built Kiwii for

We built it for the business owners we were a few years ago. You probably have between five and fifty employees, two or three shifts a day, an external accounting firm, and the feeling that half your week goes to things that aren't your actual business.

If what you've read above sounds like your daily life, Kiwii is exactly for you. Hospitality, beauty, retail, workshops, clinics, professional offices — any Spanish small business with employees.

Want to try it?

Fourteen days free, no credit card. No lock-in, no hardware, no mandatory training. If after trying it it doesn't save you at least four hours a week, don't renew. It's that simple.

See plans and pricing → Write to us