Nomo is for everyday workers who earn their money the hard way — and shouldn’t lose a cent of it come tax time.
I started building Nomo because I watched it happen at my own kitchen table.
My husband is a tradie. Every year around July, he’d dig through the ute, the toolbox, his jacket pockets, the glovebox, hunting for receipts that were faded, lost, or had never made it home in the first place. The kilometres he drove between jobs? Never counted. The gear he bought just to do his work? Half of it forgotten by the time tax rolled around. He grafted all year, paid his PAYG tax on time, and then quietly left money on the table simply because keeping track of everything was a pain.
And it wasn’t just him. I work full time as an engineer in construction, so I’m on sites and around trades all week. I saw how normal it was for people to buy tools on the way to a job, drive between sites, pick up supplies, throw a receipt in the ute and think, “I’ll sort that out later.” Most of the time, later never came. And once I started paying attention, I realised this wasn’t really a tradie problem at all. It was everywhere. Nurses buying their own shoes and equipment. Teachers paying for classroom supplies out of their own pocket. People in all kinds of jobs spending their own money for work, then forgetting half of it by the time July came around.
You know how it goes. You stop by Bunnings on the way home. Pay for parking at a client meeting. Grab something you need for work. Put the receipt somewhere safe and tell yourself you’ll sort it out later. Then tax time arrives. You know you spent money for work. But the receipts have disappeared, the trips are long forgotten, and suddenly you’re relying on memory. Most people either spend hours trying to piece everything together or simply give up and claim less than they could have.
That never sat right with me.
We use technology to remember almost everything else in our lives. Our calendars remember our meetings. Our banking apps remember every purchase. Our phones remember where we’ve been. Yet when it comes to keeping records that could make a real difference at tax time, most of us are still relying on memory. So I started building the thing I wished my husband had.
Nomo is simple on purpose. It keeps your receipts in one place. It tracks your work trips. It helps you keep an eye on things you may want to record. And it talks to you in plain English, not tax jargon. I never wanted to build another finance app full of charts, dashboards, and features nobody asked for. I just wanted something that could quietly keep track of the boring stuff in the background, so you don’t have to spend a weekend in July trying to remember your own life.
My favourite thing in the whole app is one small line on the home screen. I love watching that number climb. Because behind that number are real things someone nearly forgot. A trip between jobs. A pair of work shoes. Something bought months ago and never thought about again. That’s the whole reason Nomo exists.
When you start building something and it begins to work, there’s a lot of advice about what you’re supposed to do next. Raise money. Hire a big team. Make a five year roadmap. Chase growth. Add more features. Keep getting bigger. Maybe one day Nomo will be bigger. I don’t know. But I don’t want getting bigger to become the point.
Nomo’s way: small on purpose. One careful little app, built with the people using it. Getting bigger was never the point.
I want to keep building Nomo with the people who actually use it. There’s no five year roadmap pinned to a wall. If something is missing, tell me. If something is confusing, tell me. If there’s a part of the app that annoys you every time you open it, I genuinely want to know. What we build next should come from real problems people are having, not from what looks good in a pitch deck.
Sometimes the smallest request turns into one of the most useful things in the app. Sometimes we have an idea we think is great, then realise nobody actually needs it. That’s fine too.
I also want Nomo to grow in a way that feels right. Person to person. If it helps you, maybe you tell a mate at smoko, someone on the next shift, a colleague at work, or that friend who complains about tax every July. I’d rather earn that recommendation than chase growth for the sake of a nice looking chart.
And I want support to stay human. Right now, if you send Nomo a message, there’s a good chance I’m the person reading it. I don’t want people bounced around a ticket queue or fed a script when something has gone wrong. I can’t promise we’ll always get everything right, but I can promise we’ll listen.
Most days, it’s still just me and a developer I trust. I build Nomo around a full time job and a young kid, which means early mornings, late nights, and stolen half hours wherever I can find them. I answer the messages, read the feedback, sweat the small stuff, and think about other people’s faded receipts more than is probably healthy.
I’m not trying to build the biggest tax app. I want to build one people trust. One that quietly remembers the things you don’t. One that feels simple enough to actually use. One that gets better because the people using it are part of building it.
The mission is still the same as when I started. Help everyday Australians keep better records, stop forgetting legitimate deductions, and keep more of what they’ve already earned.
If you want to back what we’re doing, the best thing you can do is use Nomo. Push it. Tell me what’s missing. Tell me what’s annoying. Tell me where it falls short. And if Nomo helps you and earns your trust, pass it on to someone who’s tired of doing tax the hard way. If you’re already using Nomo, thank you. And if you’re not yet, I’d love the chance to win you over.
Paula, Founder of Nomo
Try Nomo for yourself