

inDinero (YC S10) launches Mint.com for Businesses - jlm382
http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/02/indinero-launches-as-the-mint-com-for-small-businesses/

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apowell
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
"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.

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

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zavulon
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...](http://satisfaction.mint.com/mint/topics/citi_business_not_allowed_or_am_i_setting_it_up_wrong)?

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 :)

~~~
jlm382
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

~~~
colincor
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?

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endlessvoid94
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?

~~~
jlm382
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
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.

------
SwellJoe
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.

~~~
catch23
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
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.

~~~
catch23
I think that's what Yodlee is for right? Yodlee is what mint.com also used for
their integrations with FIs.

------
heresy
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.

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portman
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.

~~~
jlm382
on it, will follow up via email.

~~~
portman
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.

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jaxn
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 :(

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

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jonathanmarcus
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.

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mattmaroon
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.

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colinplamondon
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.

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mahipal
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.

------
aresant
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 -

~~~
jlm382
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!

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

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marcamillion
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.

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

~~~
dfield
They just graduated from Berkeley.

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andy
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.

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savrajsingh
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>

------
Synthetase
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.

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lionheart
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.

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ericd
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?

------
il
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!

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

~~~
dfield
But those graphs were sexy ;)

~~~
kajecounterhack
Oh def Dylan ;D

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lordmatty
Guys should check out Xero - quality piece of software.

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grandalf
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.

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davidedicillo
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 :)

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

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

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kmfrk
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?

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

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

~~~
jmatt
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.

~~~
jonathanmarcus
Based on my initial test of inDinero, Mint/tags + python script seems like the
better option. Their interface is more refined and auto-tagging is more
powerful. Its not entirely clear how the inDinero product is different from
Mint.

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

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pquerna
Congrats, looks great so far!

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blader
Congratulations Jessica! It's looking AWESOME.

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pibefision
Very nice layout

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emrosenf
Congrats Andy & Jessica!

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danielbru
Congrats Jessica and Andy!

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rgrieselhuber
Congrats guys!

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francisd
congrats on the launch!

