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In Estonia, starting a company is famously easy. The public record stands at 15 minutes—a demo performed on stage in London by people already familiar with our systems. The running joke is that if you’re really slick, you can do it in under 10 minutes, because in that very demo, six minutes were lost to internet connectivity issues. In everyday life, an ordinary founder might spend about an hour to complete the process online. That is still exceptionally good.
But once that first step is taken, what comes next? I’ve heard new founders describe the feeling as being “alone in a vast desert.” From that point on, every company’s path is different and largely up to the entrepreneur. At a macro level, though, we want these companies to be as successful and efficient as possible. One proven way is digitalisation: automate administrative tasks so owners can focus on the work that actually drives business growth. No one starts a firm to deal with paperwork, so let’s shrink that unpleasant part to the minimum. Nowadays, the primary term used is real-time economy, which refers to converting manual reporting into an automated data flow.
Because it’s so easy to start up here, Estonians are very active entrepreneurs. Statistics show that every tenth Estonian is an entrepreneur. The result is an economy where the overwhelming majority of companies are microenterprises or SMEs. Many are sole proprietors, family businesses, and similar small companies. Their volumes are modest, so reporting the old-school way doesn’t feel unbearable; they often lack both resources and motivation to digitalise.
The same goes for customers and partners: if your buyers are small and not digital themselves, there’s little perceived need to switch to e-invoices or to digitalise and automate workflows.
Digital topics are, frankly, unsexy. Picture a rural Estonian beekeeper selling honey and beeswax candles. Why would they be interested in automated reporting? Understandably, they wouldn’t be. It sounds like extra hassle, something new to learn, so it becomes a time and money cost.
So how do we make this attractive to entrepreneurs who aren’t planning to scale? Expecting every micro business to “grow first, digitalise later” is unrealistic. The real question is how the state and the broader ecosystem can support a practical transition.
I don’t claim to have a perfect answer. However, a lower-cost, credible approach is to show the carrot and share more early success stories. When entrepreneurs see time saved, fewer errors, faster payments, and simpler compliance in businesses like theirs, digitalisation stops being abstract and starts looking useful.
Let me share one success story with you. Let’s go to Rakvere Hospital. As a public healthcare institution, the hospital has numerous reporting requirements. To reduce the workload, the hospital sought to adopt the real-time economy principle in presenting workforce and salary-related statistics to multiple public institutions. It was clear that the most time-consuming element was the monthly basic reporting on taxes paid on salaries. Rakvere Hospital demonstrates how small, targeted digital initiatives yield rapid results. By shifting payroll and workforce reporting to data-driven automation, the hospital cut its annual reporting time from 55.6 hours to 7 hours, saving ~48 hours a year. The one-off setup cost was €675, but the yearly saving was around €900, which means a payback period of under a year. The takeaway for micro and small firms: start with the most frequent, high-volume reports. Once data flows directly from your accounting software to the authorities, duplicate work and keystrokes disappear.
The good thing is that the motivation of an entrepreneur is the last missing piece. Estonia already has the digital infrastructure for this change, and the state is motivated to introduce real-time economy principles. The only thing is to start and then watch the hours spent on admin begin to dry up.
