A SUCCESSFUL software entrepreneur has launched an app for small businesses that turns a bewildering amount of data into a handy digest on a mobile phone.

Andrew Walker developed Ikooloo to bring together information from social media, sales software and invoicing.

“The idea came from my wife. She runs a sewing shop in Christchurch. She was relatively new to running a business,” the Bournemouth businessman said.

“We were having a conversation and I asked how her business was doing. She said ‘Actually, I don’t really know. We’ve got all this software and I don’t know how each one’s doing and how they work together’.

“A lot of solutions are driven by the need to have a laptop with you. Most people now do a lot more on their phones,” he said.

“For small businesses, if you want a really quick idea where your business was, on your phone, there didn’t seem to be that much around.

“Talking to other small businesses, everybody seemed to have a similar problem. So I just started to build it.”

The free version of Ikoolo, available for iPhone and Android devices, brings together data from a business’s accounts with Facebook, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, MailChimp, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

The paid version, which costs subscribers £8 a month, pulls in information from other business software such as Delighted, Insightly, Salesforce, Stripe and Xero.

“I tried to make it a bit more fun and accessible rather than big graphs and a screen on a computer that you don’t really know what it means,” he said.

“For small businesses, there’s so much to do and people spend so much time trying to figure out what to do. When I launched my business, I spent a lot of time analysing data to figure out what I could do better,” he said.

Mr Walker’s previous businesses included Clicktools, which provided customer satisfaction surveys for the business-to-business market, and counted American Express and Barclays among its clients. It was partly acquired by Survey Monkey before being taken over by global firm Callidus.