A GROWING software firm has become the 100th company to receive backing from the North East’s Microloan Fund as it rolls out a new fund management application.

Newcastle-based Pebble has received an investment of £25,000 from the fund, which is part of the Finance for Business North East portfolio and managed by Entrust, as it begins deploying its new Fund Manager accounting software for schools, charities and clubs.

The cloud-based system integrates with online payments providers and helps manage receipts and payments to produce financial reports.

It includes an account register function that can be used for recording school dinners via an app on a hand-held tablet.

Pebble’s new software encourages data integration and sharing with other applications. After five months in development, Pebble is now beta testing the product before its launch in January when pilots will run with six local authorities, covering 40 schools.

The company has created two jobs to support the roll out and will add a further three to its team before the end of the year on the back of the investment.

Janis Green, CEO of Pebble, said: “The new fund manager has been designed alongside schools and local authorities specifically to meet the needs of the market.

“We’ve built on our existing locally hosted software to create a cloud-based solution that’s intuitive to use so that financial managers and administrators can easily record and report transactions.

“It’s easier to integrate with other systems because it is cloud-based and so is ideal for monitoring things such as school dinner money. It’s also very cost-effective and we’re confident it will be a market leader.”