Rupert Taylor

Rupert Taylor is the founder of GemJam. Since 2013 he has run the back office of a UK dealing business — the bookkeeping, the stock book, the website — and he writes GemJam's code himself. The product exists because the Airtable-and-Zapier system he built to run that back office works, but it is expensive, complicated and needs maintaining every time a service changes its API.

While the rest of the team does the buying and selling, Rupert has always looked after everything behind it: the purchase and sales records, the stock book, the accounts and the website. That taught him exactly which corners existing inventory tools cut for dealers of unique stock, and which HMRC obligations they leave you to handle by hand.

Before GemJam, that back office ran on Shopify for listings and an Airtable database that records every purchase and sale and sends them on to Xero, all joined together by Zapier automations. It works, but it costs over £1,000 a year, it is complicated, and it needs maintaining: whenever a service changes its API or asks to be re-authorised, something has to be fixed, and it can take days to remember how the pieces fit together. GemJam is the software Rupert built to replace that stack, starting with his own business.

Every feature in GemJam exists because a real dealer needed it. The VAT Margin Scheme calculations, the Xero-compatible export, the unique-stock model where each item is either in stock or sold — all of it comes from years of running the same workflow by hand.