A Newcastle based software development business is enjoying it’s time in the sun due to ongoing support from Scaleup North East.

Burns Software Development was formed in 2016 by renowned software developer Anthony Burns. His intention was to build simple software solutions for small businesses who are starting to experience growing pains, allowing owners’ time to be spent on more important things.

The Holiday Tracker, the first product launched by Burns Software Development, has successfully gained customers nationwide. Designed to simplify the management of annual leave and absence, the platform enables employees to request holidays from any device, while giving managers full visibility of their team’s leave, sickness and other absences before approving requests. It also calculates holiday entitlement automatically, including for part-time staff, shift workers and employees who join mid-year or change their working patterns.

In 2024, Anthony’s wife, Helen, a secondary school English teacher for 17 years, left the education sector to join the business as Head of Customer Experience. This provided a significant step change in marketing activity, branding and customer engagement leading to further growth.

More recently, working alongside Scaleup Partner Craig Huntingdon, the business has developed a clear growth strategy and begun building a sales and marketing engine that is more predictable and efficient. By being laser focussed on the target market, establishing clear performance metrics and exploring different market access points, new customers in new areas are being successfully converted.

Craig Huntingdon, Scaleup Partner, ScaleUp North East said,

‘Making something incredibly simple is incredibly difficult. Anthony has successfully achieved this with The Holiday Tracker, providing small business owners with a simple to use tool that replaces paper forms and spreadsheets that can be complex, inaccurate and time-consuming. Traction to date have been really strong but now it’s time for the business to invest in sales and marketing processes that can drive exponential growth and scale the business’.

Anthony Burns, Founder, Burns Software Development said,

‘Craig was recommended to us by a business owner he’d worked with previously. He’s provided us with the confidence that we are on the correct path, our business model is robust and what is now necessary to achieve our aspirations for the business. We are grateful for the support received to date and been able to continue working with Craig as we enter this exciting growth phase.'

Learn more about the Scaleup North East programme by visiting: Scaleup North East :: Home