

Show HN: Scribesend – Stripe for accounting - fjw
http://scribesend.com/

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jeffmould
Congratulations on your launch. Although I have a few questions:

1\. How are you different than the other companies offering SaaS accounting
services (i.e. Freshbooks, Xero, Quickbooks, Indinero all come to mind but
there are others)?

2\. Understand you are just getting started, but the website is very basic
and, not to be rude, doesn't make me feel like I am working with a secure
business.

3\. There is no privacy policy, terms of service, pricing, or anything that
would make me feel secure in sending you my data, especially my accounting
data.

4\. The benefit of an accounting platform is not having to manage reports,
billing, or end of year numbers to do taxes. This seems like I would have to
do a lot of development to build an accounting package around my own data.
What is the benefit to me? If I hook into the Freshbooks API I can log into
their site and see nice reports, handle billing, etc...

~~~
fjw
Hi Jeff, thanks for the questions!

1\. A lot of the existing services are clunky and their API offerings are hard
(though not impossible!) to use -- making them hard to interface with online
applications. But for the most part, these are accounting software suites
designed for a general audience, with an API offered. If you have a lot of
microtransactions to process, or your application requires some financial
logic baked in (gift cards, marketplace payouts, detailed account receipts for
a insurance/co-pay splits, etc), having an API can help greatly.

Additionally, our API is being designed with specific developer use cases in
mind: general use cases like subscription billing, sane integrations with
payment gateways like Stripe and Braintree, online invoicing, and tax
reporting will be designed around online businesses and Saas applications.
Again, software like QuickBooks is designed to be broadly used, and thus, may
be harder for you to get started in (especially if you do not have an
accountant handy). The API will always support general use (you can do
whatever you want with the API!), but developer abstractions will be top-of-
mind.

2, 3. I hear you and thank you for the concerns. These are all things that
definitely need to be done before opening the product up.

4\. Here are some benefits I see:

\- real-time financial stats that are updated as the transactions are made,
and not just whenever the transactions are reconciled — and can be used (and
understand) by everyone from the CFO to the accountant to the engineers

\- generate real-time account statements for users, just like your bank is
able to provide you — you can control how much data you show to users using
your own internal business logic

\- a secure financial data store that you can send GET requests to whenever
you need the data. Examples where I see this doing well include in-app
currencies and credit systems, gift cards, managing marketplaces and seller
payouts, managing receipts, showing users detailed account statements, sales
tax management, etc.

\- write scripts, perform analytics, and use the data/certain subsets of the
data as you wish — it'll be much easier to export and analyze this data than
with other software

\- saves you engineering time from building your own financial infrastructure,
or trying to hook it up to other accounting software suites

Also, more reporting endpoints
([http://scribesend.com/docs#reports](http://scribesend.com/docs#reports))
will be added soon!

Obviously, we're not 100% of the way there yet, but hopefully this clears
things up a bit.

------
saintfiends
Had a quick look and I can't seem to find anything related to managing taxes.
Even in the `entry_lines` I can't seem to find a way to store tax amounts.

Am I missing something?

~~~
fjw
Hi, thanks for the comment! Taxes have not been added in yet, but will
probably be a percentage value in the accounts object. This will then be used
to automatically generate sales tax reports.

Friends/potential customers haven't asked for taxes yet so not all (crucial)
features have been added in just yet. That's what this post is here to expose
:) Are there any other glaring omissions you see?

~~~
saintfiends
I'm sorry if I'm not understanding correctly, but how would setting tax on
accounts help?. Taxes may differ depending on the item.

\- I would suggest to add support for fixed value taxes along with
percentages.

\- Items need to have a SKU field of some sort.

~~~
fjw
Apologies on the delay. My thought was that items with the same tax rates
could be grouped together in the same account so the tax rate doesn't need to
be passed in when creating every entry. Does that make sense?

Thanks!

