Soraban didn't start from a whiteboard. It started from tax season — the real one. The one with the chasing and the waiting and the work that shouldn't have needed to exist in the first place.
Soraban started with a simple conversation. A friend who was a CPA walked Enoch Ko, founder of Soraban, through what tax season actually looked like behind the scenes. It wasn't strategy or advisory. It was chasing documents, renaming files, following up again, and trying to keep everything from slipping through the cracks.
At the time, Enoch was a software engineer. It sounded like a solvable problem. So he tried to solve it the obvious way: he started a AI-first accounting firm and set out to automate as much of the workflow as possible.
It did not go the way he expected. Enoch found himself in the same cycle — long hours, constant interruptions, hiring people to keep up with work that should not have needed to exist in the first place.
That was the moment it clicked. The problem was not effort. It was the way the work was set up.
Most accounting firms are not broken. They are working incredibly hard inside workflows that were never designed to scale.
Too much of tax season is still held together by email threads, portals, spreadsheets, and manual follow-ups. Admins chase. Preparers wait. Partners step in to fix process issues instead of focusing on clients. We didn't need another checklist or another system to manage the work — we needed something that actually does the work.
The name is a nod to the soroban, the Japanese abacus, refined over centuries into something so precise and intuitive that a skilled user can out-calculate an electronic calculator. It’s calculation as craft.
That’s the standard we hold ourselves to. In the spirit of the Japanese design tradition that influenced people like Steve Jobs, we believe how something is made matters as much as what it does.
We sweat the details most people will never notice: the way a document is split, the reconciliation happening quietly in the background, the data model behind the platform. When the parts you can’t see are built with care, the parts you can see simply feel right.
From the beginning, a deep understanding of the everyday problems accountants face has been critical to our success. That remains true every season and with every new team member that joins.
Soraban exists to make tax work feel less chaotic, and a lot more manageable — for the people who actually do the work, and for the clients who depend on them.
Efficient and hands-on onboarding. No migration. No waiting to see ROI.