How a Lab Experiment Turned into the Affordable Business Management Platform for Philippine SMEs

What started as an academic research project exploring whether artificial intelligence could read handwritten sales records has since developed into KLARO, a Philippine technology startup building practical data infrastructure for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). A little over a year after presenting its research internationally, the team has secured its first institutional client, marking an important step from university research to everyday business use.

Across the Philippines, many businesses still rely on notebooks, receipts, invoices, spreadsheets, and chat messages to manage their operations. These tools often work well individually. The difficulty emerges as businesses grow and information becomes scattered across people and documents, making simple questions such as what sold, who still owes what, what is running low, and how much the business earned (among many other things) increasingly difficult to answer.

KLARO was built around this problem. Rather than asking businesses to replace the processes they already use, the platform turns their existing records into structured, usable business data.

How Did KLARO Develop From Research Into a Real-World Business Platform?

KLARO began at the Business Insights Laboratory for Development (BUILD) of Ateneo de Manila University, where the research team explored how optical character recognition (OCR) and large language models could digitize handwritten sales records from micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs).

Using actual sales logbooks from a food stall at Ateneo’s JGSOM Student Enterprise Center (JSEC), the team developed an early prototype that could read handwritten records, identify products, match them with prices, and generate structured sales summaries. The results were promising but imperfect. Sales data extraction recorded precision and recall scores of 0.55 and 0.54, while product matching achieved 0.32 precision and 0.62 recall.

The research revealed something important: reading a document was only part of the problem. A useful system also needed to understand the context of each business, including its products, customers, prices, and operating practices, while allowing people to review and correct the information it produced.

The research was presented in June 2025 at the 6th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in HCI (AI-HCI 2025), part of HCI International 2025 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and was subsequently published by Springer Nature in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. It later received coverage from Ateneo de Manila University News, GMA News Online, The Manila Times, Manila Standard, and several other science and technology publications.

The exposure led to conversations with cooperative leaders, market managers, distributors, and business owners who were working with different records but facing a similar problem: could the technology make their data useful too?

What Did KLARO Learn From Working With Philippine Businesses?

The team began exploring that question through engagements with cooperatives, agricultural enterprises, and trading facilities in Benguet, Pangasinan, and Nueva Vizcaya.

At the Nueva Vizcaya Agricultural Terminal, approximately 895 tons of vegetables move through the facility every day, generating records across produce transactions, market activities, stalls, parking, entrance fees, and transportation. Much of this information has traditionally been recorded on paper, making large-scale consolidation and analysis difficult.

Cooperatives faced similar challenges as their businesses grew. One cooperative president in Benguet explained:

“As our business grows, the increasing volume of invoices and hardcopies makes tracking difficult, leading to missed receivables and leakages.”

The fieldwork helped clarify that the problem extended well beyond agriculture. Businesses across industries were already generating valuable data, but much of it remained trapped in documents, binders, or scattered across disconnected systems. That shifted KLARO’s focus from simply digitizing documents to building a practical data platform for growing businesses.

How Does KLARO Turn Everyday Business Records Into Usable Data?

Today, KLARO is built around a straightforward idea: the records a business already creates can become the foundation for understanding its operations.

An invoice contains information about what was sold, to whom, at what price, and whether payment remains outstanding. A supplier receipt contains information about costs and inventory. A handwritten sales log contains information about revenue and product movement. Together, these documents already contain much of the data a business needs.

The challenge is turning that information into structured data without requiring employees to encode every transaction again.

KLARO allows users to photograph or upload logbooks, receipts, invoices, screenshots, and other existing records. AI-assisted document processing extracts the relevant information and connects it with the business’s products, customers, and records. Users can then review and correct the information before saving it.

Once captured, the data flows into KLARO’s sales, expenses, inventory, and receivables tools. Owners and teams can monitor revenue, costs, collections, inventory movement, and historical activity from one platform instead of treating every document as an isolated record.

This is particularly relevant for SMEs that have outgrown purely manual recordkeeping but may not need, or may not be ready for, a complex enterprise resource planning system. KLARO is designed to work on top of existing processes rather than requiring businesses to redesign their operations around new software.

How Can KLARO Help SMEs Turn Business Data Into Better Decisions?

As KLARO worked with more businesses, it became clear that digitization itself was not the end goal. Business owners do not necessarily need more data. They need a clearer understanding of what their data is telling them.

For a distributor, that can mean knowing which customers still have outstanding balances. For a retailer, it can mean seeing which products need to be restocked. For a bakery or restaurant, it can mean connecting daily sales with expenses and inventory. For a cooperative, it can mean bringing volumes, payments, and member transactions into one place.

KLARO therefore developed from an OCR tool into a broader business management and data platform. Sales and expenses feed into financial dashboards, transactions affect inventory, invoices connect to receivables and collections, and historical records remain searchable and exportable.

A manager from a bakery and pastry business described the need this way:

“We need one system to track our sales, receivables, and inventory while keeping our team aligned and working from the same information.”

The aim is to give SMEs a clearer view of their operations without creating another layer of administrative work. Owners, staff, and accountants can work from the same underlying information while the original business documents remain part of the record.

How Did KLARO's First Institutional Sale Validate Its Business Management Platform?

KLARO’s first institutional sale came from a consumer electronics distributor, demonstrating that the problem was not limited to the industries where the technology was originally developed.

Like many growing distributors, the company manages orders, delivery receipts, invoices, collections, and other records across different people and stages of a transaction. As transaction volumes increase, keeping this information synchronized becomes increasingly important for operations, collections, and management oversight.

The company’s Director described the need:

“We need a system that keeps everything in order, from digitizing our records for compliance to tracking collections and cash flow, and giving us a clear view of how the business is doing.”

The company began using KLARO through a trial with actual transactions from its operations. That engagement subsequently developed into a signed contract, becoming KLARO’s first institutional sale.

For the team, the milestone validated the broader premise behind the platform. The same underlying system that began by interpreting a handwritten food-stall logbook could support a distributor managing invoices, collections, inventory, and financial information. More importantly, it demonstrated that KLARO’s value was not tied to one document type or industry. The larger opportunity was helping businesses turn the records they already generate into data they can use.

What Affordable Business Management Solution Is Built for Philippine SMEs and MSMEs?

This need extends across a significant portion of the Philippine economy. Wholesale and retail account for around 46% of Philippine MSMEs, while accommodation and food service activities represent roughly another 14%. These businesses generate invoices, receipts, sales logs, delivery records, inventory counts, and purchase records every day.

Many already use digital tools, but these tools are often fragmented. Accounting may happen in spreadsheets, orders through messaging applications, inventory in separate files, and transactions on paper. The problem is not always the absence of technology. It is that the information is spread across systems that do not communicate with one another.

As businesses grow, this fragmentation becomes more costly. Employees spend more time encoding and reconciling records. Owners receive information later. Receivables become easier to overlook, while inventory decisions depend on incomplete data.

KLARO is being developed as a data layer for this environment. By using existing business documents as inputs, the platform reduces repetitive encoding and creates structured information that can support financial, inventory, and operational decisions.

The value of KLARO, therefore, is not the OCR or AI itself. Those technologies make data capture easier. The larger objective is to give SMEs reliable and accessible business data without requiring them to build sophisticated information systems of their own.

For an owner, that can mean seeing sales, expenses, and profit without consolidating multiple spreadsheets. For a collections team, it can mean knowing which invoices remain unpaid. For an operations manager, it can mean knowing what needs to be restocked based on actual transactions. As the business grows, the same foundation can support more employees, outlets, transactions, and reporting requirements.

How Was KLARO Supported in Its Transition From Research to Enterprise?

KLARO’s development from academic research into a company was supported by two Ateneo institutions. BUILD provided the environment in which the original research was developed and tested, including mentorship, research guidance, and access to real-world business data.

The Ateneo Center for Social Entrepreneurship (ACSEnt) supported the team’s transition from research to social enterprise. Through the KISLAP grant, ACSEnt helped support KLARO’s incorporation, field immersions with SMEs and agricultural cooperatives, and the infrastructure needed to continue developing and deploying the platform.

Together, these experiences allowed the team to test its assumptions outside the university and understand how businesses actually create and use information. What began as a technical question about whether AI could interpret handwritten records gradually became a broader effort to make business data more accessible to Philippine enterprises.

The team remains grateful to BUILD, ACSEnt, its research mentors, and the businesses and organizations that participated in its early research and pilots. Their involvement helped KLARO move from demonstrating what the technology could do to understanding what businesses actually needed it to do.

What Software Solution Fits the Everyday Operations of Philippine Small Businesses?

With its first institutional contract secured, KLARO is expanding its work with distributors, retailers, food businesses, cooperatives, and other growing enterprises. The team continues to improve how the platform understands different business documents and turns them into information for inventory management, receivables, financial monitoring, and everyday decision-making.

The technology has changed considerably since the first experiment with a handwritten sales logbook, but the problem remains familiar. Businesses already generate large amounts of useful information through their daily operations. KLARO’s goal is to make that information accessible without forcing businesses to abandon the processes that already work for them. A notebook can remain a notebook, an invoice can remain an invoice, and a receipt can remain a receipt. What changes is what the business can do with the information inside them.

From academic research to its first institutional sale, KLARO is continuing toward the same objective: helping Philippine SMEs see their businesses more clearly and make better decisions using the data they already have.

KLARO is currently offering a free 30-day trial for interested businesses, with complimentary setup and an end-of-trial review. Businesses and organizations may visit www.meetklaro.com or contact info@meetklaro.com to schedule a demonstration.

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