

Rate/Review my startup - Bionic Books - jsvaughan
http://www.bionicbooks.com

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swombat
1\. I tried clicking all over the screenshot bits before signing up, but it
went nowhere

2\. Got a bit confused by the shares bit. I set up 1 share of value 1 pound,
and then ended up with a balance of -£1. Actually, this now makes me realise
that I should have paid £1 into my account for my share... so it's correct,
but still a little confusing, perhaps a "why" link would be helpful.

3\. There were some visual glitches with the help box in Firefox on Mac while
adding a Sales entry.

4\. I have my own numbering convention for my invoices. I should be able to
enter my own invoice number, particularly when entering historical invoices.

5\. When adding several line items to an invoice, it should automatically
duplicate the tax status of the item above.

6\. When there's only 1 account set up, the "Cash paid into account:" field
should default to that.

7\. I forgot to select the customer after typing it into the "add" box (I
forgot to click add, basically). 1) the error should be more visible, 2) the
field should be highlighted when i've typed something and not clicked add, so
that I know there's still something to be done there.

8\. The help is quite annoying. It should be hidden by default, I reckon.

Good so far though! I'll be coming back to continue setting up my accounts
there. I've been looking for something like this. I'm not sure about your
pricing, however... I would just keep the single-user account and print things
out to send to my accountant, so you wouldn't make any money from me. However,
I also wouldn't pay for it in its current state yet, so it may be worth
keeping it like this for the time being until you figure out a better pricing
model (or perhaps you'll find that people will sign up for it as is). Maybe
you should base the charge on the turnover of the company? Free under £50k of
yearly turnover... £5/m between £50-100k... £10 between 100/200... etc.

Hope this helps!

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joshsharp
I don't know if this is a geek thing or something the average user would do,
but I'd really like to see more, full-sized screenshots of the app before I
sign up. Not being able to see more of it means I'm more inclined to click
away from the site.

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vaksel
I'm not sure the name works, w/o reading the comments I expected this to be a
book store website

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amrithk
I think this is a pretty good idea. There's certainly a market out there for
easy-to-use accounting services. You can get a sizeable revenue stream by
offering some kind of consulting service where you help small organizations
with their accounting tasks.

Only thing is there may be a problem getting people to store information about
their businesses etc online.

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ryanmahoski
App is mostly functional but doesn't live up to the marketing hype. Surprised
you're accepting payments this early. The lofty promises of "no more
accountants," "safe from the tax man" and "it does everything you need" strike
me as careless if not legally binding. Unclear why the word "online" is needed
5 times on the home page - seems obvious enough this thing is a web app.
Signed up for the free "forever" account. The language is starting to drag -
work on copy editing. Maybe simplify the 'Select Package' headings - e.g. just
say: "Single user account | Free | [Select]" or something to that effect.
Consider adding a success page after that form - better yet just log the user
in.

Setup let me bypass all elements so I posted to payroll - and I think that
broke your algorithm because now the (ks-Info-Neutral) div at the top of every
panel says: "An error occurred, please try again."

Invoiced a customer, which wasn't easy. Stymied because I didn't specify a
tax. Good thing I remembered where to set that constant - had to back out, re-
entered Setup then added a Tax Item...which should have worked but didn't -
until it occured to me maybe I should give it something called a Parent Group.
Boom, but now I notice the tax rate isn't transferring from the Setup pane.
That's right, the Invoice displays 0% even though I entered Tax Item in Setup
as 3.4%. Oh well, it works - and that concerns me. On to the financial
statements. It appears I owe my creditors negative 1 million dollars. Haha so
does that mean they owe me? Need some commas in there to separate digits into
threes. Nice drilldown on the P&L. Open in Excel link broken. Hiding Help - oh
this is wild: Help is a different feature than Help! with an exclamation mark
which logs me out and takes me to an unbranded site.

Caveat: I've built some corporate tax software for a US state revenue dept and
managed expense+reporting tech evangelism at a corporate card company. That
said, my work has been tangential at best to Bionic Books and I'm not a CPA so
take my comments with salt.

~~~
jsvaughan
Thanks for looking in so much detail - and in most of these cases you're
right, I need to get this sorted. Help vs help particularly :) The sales tax
setup is not straightforward; your feedback on this is very interesting.
Perhaps I should just offer this to the UK for now where there are std sales
tax rates. A few of the commenters here picked us up on the homepage and I'll
be changing that quite a lot.

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maxklein
I was really annoyed that I did not even see screenshots of the app and you
were already asking me to pay for app. Why are there no screenshots on the
frontpage?

And you really don't need more features, it seems already a bit full right
now.

Very frankly, this is a tool for a real mom & pop store, and not for a web
business. Put it in adobe air or one of those offline browsers and you can
sell it for 300 pounds a piece as CD software. It will be more profitable than
trying to convince people to use it online.

Personally, it's just too complicated to be useful to me. But I know that such
software usually looks that way (like all those old school VB software).

I dunno, I'm not really qualified to judge as all I need for my accounting is
just a simple 3 column spreadsheet.

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astrec
Tough sell: I just don't feel compelled to sign up.

Sign up is free, right? Why not shift to gradual engagement - let me play with
the app, enter a few invoices, add a few clients etc. and then when I want to
save my work have me sign up & make an informed choice about package.

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jsvaughan
Stuff I'm not 100% happy with at the moment includes the popup help and the
look and feel, which is a bit rough around the edges.

I've also got a big stack of story cards yet to implement, the top 5 being:

1\. Invoicing in days x rate

2\. Printing invoices

3\. Printable VAT returns

4\. Loans + long term liabilities

5\. Future payments

and the list goes on...

I'm also thinking of changing the homepage to target a more well defined
customer.

This is all just my work so any feedback at all would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks

Jon

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jsvaughan
Thank you everyone for your thorough investigations and valuable comments.
It's pretty tough doing everything single handed and it's extremely useful to
have these opinions and such detailed feedback. Thank you again.

I'll work on sorting out as much of your recommendations as I can over the
next few days. If you are interested in keeping up with my progress then have
a look at <http://bionicbooks.wordpress.com>.

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adilsaleem
1-on the main page, you should reduce the text. The headings are self-
explanatory

2-sign up for a free account should be slightly distinguished from other
screen shots

3-it would be nice if the user is taken straight to home page rather than
selecting the package first

4-rather than medium sized screen-shots, it would be great if you can add a
demo

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dnordberg
Think the design itself is quite good. Like you said, "bit rough around the
edges" for example clicking a new tab should not center the tab on the screen.
Your using vertical-align: top; but it still is centered. Maybe its just
Firefox 3??

Also its very responsive which is good.

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zacharydanger
Never send my password to me via email.

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tptacek
Wow --- it really did mail me my password.

Why are you storing my raw password? Stop that! Most of your users are using
the same password for their Yahoo Mail account, which is effectively their
bank account. What you have now is a brand new application which hasn't been
reviewed for security that is building a database of bank-account-equivalent
passwords, which you will lose entirely to the first person who finds an SQL
error on your site.

The convention is for your email address to _reset_ your password, mailing the
new random password or a code that can be used on your site to enter a new
password. Unfortunately, the convention you adopted betrays the fact that
you're not storing passwords safely to begin with.

If you're using Rails, start with bcrypt-ruby for your passwords. If you're
using PHP, try PHPass, which is also bcrypt. Django or Python, try py-bcrypt.

Not even your administrators should know what your users passwords are.

~~~
jsvaughan
You're both absolutely right - I'll get this sorted immediately

