
Show HN: BillBuddy – Automated Invoice Processing - frits1993
https://billbuddy.io
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dboreham
Amazing that a) this deals with something very commonly encountered in all
businesses and b) someone took considerable time to make the web page BUT...

I have no clue what this service does. None!

Are these invoices that the user's business _sends_ ? ( hence this is some
form of AR management application) or are these invoices received by the
user's business ? (hence an AP management application)

In either case, surely the business is already using some sort of accounting
software and therefore what does this service do that regular Quickbooks
doesn't do?

And finally: who sends or receives thousands of invoices per month and doesn't
already have some decent management and reporting systems in place?

fwiw I worked on a startup that (I think, because we were solving the problem
alluded to on the site of making sense of arbitrarily formatted business
transaction documents) was trying to do the same thing about 15 years ago. We
were targeting big corporations dealing with high-value invoices with a broken
AR/AP process. It didn't end well, I think in part because there isn't a good
value proposition here. It has to be "you'll get paid much sooner" or "fewer
invoices will end up unpaid". Just being "nicer" or "easier" doesn't cut it.

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frits1993
Hi dboreham, thanks for the feedback.

BillBuddy started as a project for myself, where I found that it was a big
hassle to keep track of all invoices I received without manually processing
them and filling in the amounts in my own bookkeeping software.

Instead of now having to open every invoice, I simply forward the invoices an
let BillBuddy do the reading. Once per month when I do my taxes, I log in, run
an export of the parsed data and see all the data I need at a glance.

This way I know what I spent and my quarterly tax-forms are filled in much
more easily.

That's the backstory and how BillBuddy turned out to what it is today, where I
feel it mostly supports small companies of which the bookkeeping is not too
complex but a small hand comes in useful.

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bdcravens
You'd do well to have that above the fold. Your screenshot takes up a ton of
space, but looks like a generic admin screen, and it's not really information
dense. The trendy backspace and type thing helps a little, but aside from
that, the only thing I see on a 1920x1080 that convinces me to go further is
one line "All your invoices in one place by simply forwarding your emails".
I'd recommend pushing the UI candy down and pulling more of the FAQ etc up.

~~~
frits1993
Thanks a lot, will work on that.

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pwim
Your pricing is way too cheap, and makes it hard to take seriously. As a
business, there is no difference between $5 and $15 per month (and if someone
tells you differently, you don’t want their business).

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ben_jones
Though I second this, "hacker pricing" could encourage a few small early
adopters who may provide critical feedback in the early days of the product.

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sandstrom
Looks like a good service!

Obviously early stage (guess there are things to be polished) but I think it
would be useful. I've looked for a simple SaaS AP solution without all the
complexity of some of the advanced solutions.

(semi-related; anyone has tips on other good SaaS AP services?)

Some suggestions:

\- Make it clear on the website that this is AP, not AR (if that's the case).

\- Offer the first ~100 invoices for free (regardless of the plan)

\- I'd look at a stripe integration for automatic payment (if possible, not
sure that it is). Otherwise look at exporting 'bank files' that banks in most
countries can import (basically a pre-generated of transactions, uploaded then
verified and signed on the bank website).

\- Most companies will probably want an approval chain for invoices based on
the company hierarchy, invoice amount, etc.

~~~
frits1993
Thank you, those are four great bullet points I have written down and will
look into.

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kitcar
Interesting! What's the key difference between this and other "auto invoice
management" tools like ReceiptBank ( [https://www.receipt-
bank.com/](https://www.receipt-bank.com/) )?

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conception
Hmm... initial data scanning seems limited. Only amount, vendor and invoice
number. PO number strikes me as a key missing field but was hoping for full
Invoice scanning.

~~~
frits1993
Missing fields can be added, so PO number I have written down. It's less
common data here in the Netherlands, so thanks for mentioning it!

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splitbrain
Does anyone know of an open source tool that reliable extracts data from PDF
invoices? Preferably using OCR because some of my invoices are scanned.

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conception
It looks like it's email only. Is there a way to bulk upload invoices?

~~~
frits1993
Email is indeed the way to go for the moment. You can however attach multiple
files at once, so composing an email with your PDF collection does the trick.

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evolve2k
Great idea! Do you plan to integrate with xero?

~~~
frits1993
Integration with bookkeeping software is definitely on my list of to-do's, but
the details of that have yet to be determined. In the mean time, the excel/csv
export can be used to import processed invoices in bulk.

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waibelp
Nice clean and short landingpage! Well done!

