inDinero (YC S10) launches Mint.com for Businesses

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/02/indinero-launches-as-the-mint-com-for-small-businesses/

by jlm382 • 16 years ago

115 63 16 years ago

techcrunch.com

jmatt2• 16 years ago

Why, again, didn't mint just do this?

jbail• 16 years ago

They probably will.

Mint.com still seems focused on the consumer market. They just released a new "Goals" feature which helps you reach your financial goals (like buying a car, a home, etc).

Just like with the rest of Mint.com, the Goal concept could carry over for businesses as well. Businesses have goals too. Plus, with the Intuit hookup, having automated bill pay, payroll, etc tied in is pretty sweet.

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

indinero is SaaS, mint is a consumer lead gen company. similar yet very different companies.

jmatt2• 16 years ago

Yeah, I understand that.

I meant, why hasn't mint expanded to SaaS for small businesses. It's a hugely under served market and they have a product that (seemingly) easily maps. Especially since they were bought by intuit.

All that being said I will likely end up using indinero. I've been waiting for this sort of functionality to show up somewhere. I think all of us business owners can agree quickbooks, excel, etc are all painful and antiquated.

My current solution is mint/tags + python script. And I much prefer it to previous experiences with quickbooks or excel.

rgrieselhuber• 16 years ago

Congrats guys!

pquerna• 16 years ago

Congrats, looks great so far!

francisd• 16 years ago

congrats on the launch!

danielbru• 16 years ago

Congrats Jessica and Andy!

aresant• 16 years ago

It is still mind-blowing to me everytime somebody launches such a potentially disruptive application on a $35,000 seed capital budget and it looks good and is still online after being TechCrunched! Good luck and nice work -

jlm3826• 16 years ago

I'll have to admit, we cheated a bit... we won $35k in grant money before getting YCombinator funded this spring. :)

Thanks for the compliments!

mlinsey• 16 years ago

Congrats to Jessica, Andy, Borden, and Chris! Great job so far.

stanleydrew• 16 years ago

Typo on your real-time slide: "nobody has to do manually data entry anymore."

zavulon• 16 years ago

Here is a suggestion for you.

I know I, and at least 15 other people will immediately switch if you make Citibusiness Online support work. Check out this thread from Mint's support forum: http://satisfaction.mint.com/mint/topics/citi_business_not_a...?

To make a long story short, Citibank for business is a major bank and there's a lot frustrated people that would love to use Mint for their business, if only they made it work. Meanwhile, Mint has marked this issue as "complete" and doesn't look like they worked on this in 4 months.

I tried using it on your site and it also didn't work.. (stuck on 80% authentication). I realize this feature is in Beta but it looks like you guys already got further than Mint did - their interface doesn't even ask for right information.

I will sign up my business the second you make this work :)

jlm3826• 16 years ago

Hey Alex,

We're on this. Would love to have you + 15 other people switch to us :)

Figuring out which banks we don't support (that people need us to support) is a pretty big challenge. We've already gotten requests to support canadian banks and even swiss banks.

- Jess

malbiniak• 16 years ago

Keep me posted on the Swiss bank, also any offshore accounts in the Caymans. There's a couple offers coming out of Nigera that I'm about to move on.

Congratulations on the launch, and cheering for your team!

colincor• 16 years ago

This looks like it's going to be a kick ass product! To be able to get an up to date snapshot with all the information a non CFA could ask for is GREAT!

Who cares if the digital SLR is better, if its complexity makes you use it far less than the point and shoot then you'd be better off with a point and shoot. I rather a program less powerful than Quickbooks that gives me everything necessary that I can monitor every day to make crucial decisions than one I skim once a month because it's too complicated for my business needs!

One problem tough Jess - no banks outside US :(

I'm in the Cayman Islands, but I bank in different countries and a product that can help my business monitor everything at a glance would be GREAT!!!

Any word on new regions?

aaronbrethorst• 16 years ago

> (stuck on 80% authentication)

+1. I had the exact same issue earlier today. Very much looking forward to this, though.

pibefision• 16 years ago

Very nice layout

portman2• 16 years ago

Hm, it looks like the transactions aren't being linked to a sub-account.

I have 8 accounts with Bank of America, marked 1/2 as disabled, but the transactions from the disabled accounts still show up in my register. Even if I try to filter them out, it still shows all of them.

portman [dot] wills [at] gmail.com if you want more details of what I mean.

jlm3826• 16 years ago

on it, will follow up via email.

portman2• 16 years ago

Amazing support. I got a Google Chat invite and a follow-up email within 5 minutes of posting.

If you guys can keep up that level of service as you scale, you will crush it.

modoc2• 16 years ago

Same problem here.

kajecounterhack2• 16 years ago

Congrats jess & andy! Love that you got rid of flex ;)

dfield2• 16 years ago

But those graphs were sexy ;)

kajecounterhack2• 16 years ago

Oh def Dylan ;D

endlessvoid94• 16 years ago

Congrats on your launch :-)

I have a business that has grown from 0 to 500,000 pageviews / month in a little under 6 months. I haven't spent much money but my income is starting to be more significant.

I use two separate bank accounts that are personal accounts for my ad revenue deposits, and I use personal credit cards to pay for things. I understand the need, eventually, to incorporate and get separate accounts, but right now I don't have that.

So is inDinero useless to me? Should I use QuickBooks instead, as it allows for much more flexibility and manual transaction entry?

jlm3826• 16 years ago

Hey Dave,

This is an interesting thought, because although you're "supposed" to have separate accounts, the reality is that many entrepreneurs never do.

For now, inDinero would only be able to show you the finances from your combined transactions -- that is, unless you had sub accounts that you used only for business transactions, in which case we can ignore your personal sub-accounts.

Will follow up via email to figure out a better solution to this. Thanks for the feedback, Dave!

- Jessica & Co

robryan• 16 years ago

Yeah I'd imagine many smaller freelancers like myself only have the one account, which is perfectly legal here in Australia for a sole trader as long as you track the business transactions.

So yes, without having a look at the app yet, maybe having the ability to mark each transaction as business or private would be great. An extension on that to would be automatically marking transactions with certain words in descriptions, transfers from certain clients and certain expenses will always come up the same way.

mattew• 16 years ago

I am not a lawyer, but you should consider incorporation and separating out your personal affairs from your business affairs. Not only is it easier to see what is going on, it can provide you with the other benefits of incorporation.

jlm3826• 16 years ago

@mattew - in fact, the IRS often scrutinizes entrepreneurs who charge personal/business transactions to the same account. CPA could fix it by having your business account reimburse the individual, but it gets complicated very quickly.

I'd highly recommend making the 1 hour investment in getting a business sub-account with its own checkbook and debit card :)

Hope this helps!

jonathanmarcus2• 16 years ago

Congrats! We really need a service like this for http://hiidef.com

The categories need a ton of work. It seems like you just used standard personal finance categories, much like Microsoft Money or Quicken. For instance, Income via Salary / Paycheck isn't applicable for a business. And there is no obvious category for salary on the expense side.

modoc2• 16 years ago

Congrats! Just signed up, but my co-founders didn't get the invite e-mails when I added them to the account... Any ideas?

Synthetase• 16 years ago

Good job! It's really encouraging seeing a UC Berkeley grad successfully launching a start up. The support structure and culture here isn't quite geared for that but I'm super psyched to see someone persevering in spite of it.

mattmaroon• 16 years ago

I read this about 5 minutes after going to a bunch of different websites to export files for my accountant. So yeah, this fills a need.

il• 16 years ago

Congrats Jessica and Andy! I remember testing the site many months ago, it looks like it's matured and grown quite a bit since then, I'll have to give it another try. Best of luck!

kmfrk• 16 years ago

I've run into some kind of infinite log-in-log-out loop in both Chrome and Opera when I try to sync PayPal. Known issue?

coryl• 16 years ago

Curious to know the backgrounds of the founders. What were they doing before this? Students/graduates?

dfield2• 16 years ago

They just graduated from Berkeley.

grep• 16 years ago

They already have thousands customers? How come if they only launched today? Thousands?

SwellJoe• 16 years ago

With Wesabe announcing they're shutting down a couple days ago, this could be good timing. I'd been using Wesabe for our business accounts (Mint wouldn't work with one of our accounts, and Wesabe's downloader thingy did work, so it won by default). And, if it happens to address business needs a bit better than Mint or Wesabe, that's even better.

It's a huge market, but I think you've got an uphill battle. Quickbooks is so entrenched...I tried really hard to avoid it, but it does damned near everything, every accountant knows it, every tax preparer knows it, every bank exports for it, and it's cheap compared to all of the existing online double-entry products ($100 per year vs. insanely expensive monthly rates for everything I could find; I'm still using the 2009 edition so technically it's getting cheaper by the day). In the past, I didn't have a Windows box handy (Linux is my primary desktop/laptop OS and has been for a dozen years), and so I went to great lengths to deal with alternatives, like running my own SQL Ledger installation. But, now that I have a Windows partition on both machines, Quickbooks isn't a hardship.

But, given that Quickbooks requires me to babysit the transaction imports, and I only do that once every couple of months, having an automatic snapshot of all of our accounts would be awesome.

catch232• 16 years ago

There's also Outright.com, I believe they have Yodlee integration as well too. They're also free for any size account :-)

I also believe they have a rest-based oauth 2.0 api in there as well.

jaredhansen• 16 years ago

Outright doesn't (or didn't seem to, when I tried it out a month or two back) support auto import of bank transactions. So it could handle credit card transactions but you had to enter all of your deposit account data manually. Dealbreaker.

jlm3826• 16 years ago

Hey Joe,

Yup, Quickbooks is the 500lb gorilla we're going up against. Ends up that accountants we've been talking to want to get their clients onto inDinero, then export that data into QuickBooks. Especially bookkeepers, since they don't have to do as much bookkeeping and data entry anymore.

Uphill battle, here we come.

apowell• 16 years ago

Do you have an iPhone app on the way? Currently I keep a Mint account for my business which I check frequently on my iPhone. That being said, Mint is just a toy for me; the real work gets done in Quickbooks.

Your pricing seems oddly segmented. Intuitively, I don't know how many transactions I run each month. I'm not even sure how I'd count them. I'm pretty sure it isn't more than 500, but who knows. At the 'enterprise' level (and I'm certainly not enterprise) I would have a tough time justifying a price nearly equivalent to buying a copy of Quickbooks Pro every single month. Especially when my accountant is still going to want a Quickbooks file to prepare my taxes.

MarkMc• 16 years ago

"I would have a tough time justifying a price nearly equivalent to buying a copy of Quickbooks Pro every single month"

Three reasons why this pricing is clever: 1) The aim is to get you using the $30/month version, then when your business grows larger just start charging £100/month. It's so painful for a company to switch accounting software that they will gladly pay twice as much as if they had never heard of it before. 2) You can give out special offers like '25% off - only $75 per month'. This would probably sell better than a normal price of $75. 3) The £30 per month looks more attractive when it is placed directly next to a more expensive option.

jaxn2• 16 years ago

I doubt that it is a "false option" since it is so clearly based on the number of transactions.

lordmatty• 16 years ago

Guys should check out Xero - quality piece of software.

grandalf• 16 years ago

I just signed up. This looks amazing. I had been using mint but mint is full of annoying ads and is clearly not designed for businesses.

mahipal• 16 years ago

Congrats on the awesome product and launch! I've been waiting for something like this for a while. I just signed up, and it looks really promising.

Thoughts/bugs:

- I tried to add a category under "Bills," and it goes through. But the sub-menu doesn't show up on mouse-over, possibly because there's no built in categories under Bills.

- I added just one account and clicked through to the dashboard, but it shows no accounts in the bottom left sidebar and so calculates a total of $0. The graph on the right is drawn based on my actual numbers, but then the figures displayed below it are all $0.

- How about built-in categories for things web entrepreneurs commonly deal with, like legal bills or server costs?

Email me if you want screenshots/details on these.

savrajsingh• 16 years ago

Congrats! Looking forward to using this! I've always said Quickbooks is like MS Streets 98, and inDinero can be Google Maps! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143179

parkern• 16 years ago

This looks so awesome, but I'm just so paranoid about entering in my bank account/Paypal info. Anyone else feel similar?

blader• 16 years ago

Congratulations Jessica! It's looking AWESOME.

colinplamondon• 16 years ago

Really interesting- the cashflow analysis is killer! Totally worth paying for, if pricing was based around the product as a cashflow tool. The rest, though, is just a 10% Mint clone, without the flexibility.

I'd almost rather use it as a dedicated cash-flow analysis service- way more focused, way more valuable.

ericd• 16 years ago

Wow, looks pretty good. I've just been doing ad-hoc accounting, but this might convince me to get more organized.

Not sure what constitutes a "Transaction", though. Maybe include a tooltip or explanation underneath?

heresy• 16 years ago

I got pretty happy when I saw you had support for my New Zealand bank, which even Xero (an NZ startup doing the same thing) does not have.

But I'm incredibly wary entering my internet banking details into your application, no offense.

Someone with my internet banking details could pretty much run off with 5 years of savings, screw up my investment accounts, run up huge credit card bills.

Are you planning on adding an API? Since I'd happily write my own scraper to pull transactions out of my online banking to submit to my account with you.

lionheart• 16 years ago

If this can correctly parse my credit cards, bank accounts, and merchant accounts I will be a lifetime customer.

At the moment though, it does seem to be having some problem dealing with understanding PayPal transactions.

emrosenf• 16 years ago

Congrats Andy & Jessica!

jaxn2• 16 years ago

I am checking it out now. I have had a Mint account for business too just because it is a better interface than my bank. InDinero looks great.

Unfortunately it pulled in my accounts and created a ton of notification messages. When I delete one it is a full page refresh. Might take a while for me to clean up my dashboard :(

marcamillion• 16 years ago

This is AWESOME...small typo on: https://indinero.com/features/exporting

Support for your current systems. Want to download your bank or credit card transactional data to you other data management systems? Easy - just click a link, and you can instantkly take your data with you to Microsoft Excel, Quickbooks, or any other application that takes .CSV files.

In the text above, 'instantly' is spelt wrong.

davidedicillo• 16 years ago

I love inDinero... but if I didn't know I have some decent check on their way I would shoot myself looking at the dashboard :)

andy• 16 years ago

I would like to try this but I'm not prepared to pay $100 a month in addition to the $30 a month I'm paying for quickbooks online unlimited transactions. Switching will be a huge pain in the ass, but PayPal integration will be worth it, if everything else is the same.

inDinero (YC S10) launches Mint.com for Businesses

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