

Ask HN: Review Cash Curve, our free webapp. - tmbeihl
https://cashcurveapp.com/
I am working at Brighten Labs, a startup founded by a couple of my college friends.<p>We first built CashCurve in February 2009 to be our own cash flow management tool. To me, it seems simple and effective, but we would like feedback. Thanks!
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_Lemon_
Generally a good experience, needs adding to. Here's some feedback/thoughts:

1) The text boxes on the sign up page are massive and take up the whole line
(same with the login). 2) Sign up process isn't that "smooth", how about an
automatic log in instead of asking me to check my inbox? (I have my e-mail
open and it made me sigh...) 3) The sign up e-mail has a massive wall of text
on how to use the application. While it's good explaining, I feel that in the
e-mail is the wrong place. Making it a webpage will allow you to more
comfortably use bullet points and numbers and just easier to digest/find. Or
perhaps an interactive thing and point to page elements? 4) You put a $ sign
in amount field and I took this as an opportunity to change to £ which didn't
work as expected. What about putting it as "Amount ($)" or removing it
entirely. 5) Sensible default of "1" on the recurring once enabled? 6) Data
entry is a problem. 7) Missed setting a transaction to "recurring every" and
had to delete and re-add to set it. 8) Bug! Added a recurring transaction as
15 but set the type to expense, went to edit it and change it back to income.
This only changed the first transaction and further recurring transactions
were left unchanged. Clicking on the refresh button and it's now still showing
all the items as expenses again. 9) You could drop the "type" entirely and get
the user to enter -15 for expense and just 15 for an income! 10) Editing the
recurring transactions and I hit edit and I don't realise the form above me
has changed -- perhaps some sort of visual cue? Or perhaps, click the fields
and they become editable? 11) No back button (browser's button uses stale
data) to the page I was on before. Resorted to clicking the "Dashboard". 12)
Bug! Still entering data, missed the "Amount" field and it has reset my type
to "Expense". Strange that it doesn't reset the type when I miss "recurring
every" value.

Sweet! I'm finished! Problem: I would quite like to have more financial
projections but currently the problem is entering the data; you'd need ways to
easily add it (e.g. various import functions or an API. The way I see things:

cost of adding data + cost of the app (what you would charge) < cost of doing
this myself (e.g. investing time to graph the projections using my own
database (saving on data entry time!))

Grouping would also be a good feature to have e.g. I would want to project
transactions for separate things.

Controlling how far in the future I can see the forecase, although I realise
this is probably just a proof of concept app.

~~~
tmbeihl
What would you think if we added automatic Freshbooks integration? Then we
could show income from non-recurring sources.

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chime
Very cool. Reading your "about" page, I think Brighten Labs and I had the same
idea - make a free cashflow app to bring attention to other stuff we're doing.
I made a similar web-app for almost the same purpose:
<http://cashflow.zetabee.com/> (demo at: <http://cashflow.zetabee.com/demo>)

Type stuff up in an Excel-sheet like format and instantly see how it affects
your future cash. I'd been using an Excel version of this CashFlow till
earlier this year when I made it a web-app. The web-version enabled me to plan
when to quit my job, when to start my side-biz, how much to spend on
shopping/luxuries once I quit my job etc. If you are disciplined, you can
definitely use a CashFlow tool to manage your personal finances a lot better
than just following words of advice like "give up that $5/day Starbucks
habit."

The real reason a CashFlow app is better for personal finances is because your
salary is not the same every month. 26 paychecks / 12 months => 10 out of 12
months you make LESS than your average monthly salary. Also expenses like auto
insurance could occur once every 6 months, garbage bills could be thrice a
year, and water bill once every 45 days. Like the predator cycles that
Magicicada tries to avoid ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magicicada> ) if all
of your big bills end up hitting you in the same month / pay period, you will
be short on cash even if your spending hasn't changed. Or you may spend 10%
extra in that month because the prior months you didn't feel a crunch and
thought maybe you're doing well financially, so next month you can award
yourself the iPad 3G.

For people who don't live on a fixed salary, a CashFlow tool can still be very
helpful because you just put in your best-guess estimate of your
monthly/weekly earnings instead of a fixed 2-week paycheck. Even if you have
ample savings and never have to worry about spending $5k here or there, you
can still use a cash forecasting tool to meet your future savings/investment
goals.

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barmstrong
Agreed - great MVP. And nice HTML5 graphs.

However, these sort of "back of the envelope" type calculations (guessing at
the future) I usually do on paper or maybe excel at the most. They aren't the
sort of thing I keep around or feel like I'd need a web app for. Certainly,
can't imagine _paying_ for something like this.

If it auto pulled in all my expenses/income that actually occurred this could
be useful - but of course this is an accounting tool and totally different
product.

I do think there is a market for a simple/useable accounting tool that auto-
pulled in your stuff and made an income sheet/balance statement for you. Mint
leaves a lot to be desired in this area with it's "what's left" concept and
isn't applicable to business. But again, this may be way off from what you are
going for.

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pwim
Nice as an MVP, but I'm not quite sure the value it provides. As a company, we
have plenty of recurring expenses, but not much recurring income (as defined
as getting the same revenue every month). I guess we could use this to
determine when we'll exhaust our bank account if we don't receive any more
income - but that is not likely to be the case. So I'm not sure how much value
it provides.

The site mentions the tool was built for internal use at Brighten Labs.
Perhaps you can elaborate how you use the tool. An article describing what
exactly you put in to the software, and how you interpret the results might be
helpful.

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shimonamit
Very nice! Some points:

1- Can't enter one-time/recurring expense/income for past date. What happens
if I'm late?

2- Currencies? Only USD? Not a big deal since I can just pretend your USD are
my local currency, bus still... not elegant.

3- After entering recurring income, I couldn't edit it. There was no response
when clicking on 'edit' here: <https://cashcurveapp.com/recurrings>. I use
Chrome 5.0.375 on Windows XP.

~~~
shimonamit
After a bit more of a comprehensive review, here are some more comments:

1- Tracking income vs. expenses is difficult. Maybe color code income in green
and expense in red. This becomes especially difficult when clicking on the
recurring tab.

2- Optional stop date needed for recurring transactions. I can't configure a
recurring expense (such as payment in installments) over the next 3 months.

3- Recurring expenses by named months. I have recurring expenses that occur
each month, except during the summer (such as childrens' school tuition). I'd
like to configure income/expenditure for all months of the year, except
July/Aug.

4- Recurring transaction sorting. I'd like to sort by any column in desc & asc
order.

5- Transaction Categorization. I'd like to group expenses/income transactions
by custom categories: Utilities, Housing, Bank etc. When creating a new
transaction, I can choose which category to enter it under.

Great work! I look forward to future developments.

~~~
MarkEirich
Thanks for the awesome feedback.

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arnorhs
This is great! truly great. I have a few requests:

\- You have a dollar everywhere ($). it would be great if I could customize
the currency.

\- Adding the ability to add expense/income from the past would be great. I
can see how you would make the date selector disable that as a default
(because you can't travel back in time), however, when there are recent
additionas etc that were in the past and you want to add them, it is nice to
be able to see/browse the graph..

\- The recurring income/expenses seem to go back in time, not start from the
date I picked... at least everything is red and weird. I don't know if that's
a bug, maybe I just don't understand.

Great work, anyways!

~~~
MarkEirich
If you don't mind, please submit a support request at
<https://cashcurveapp.com/help> so that I can dialog with you about #3 in your
list (recurring items going back in time). If it really is a bug, I'd like to
fix it. Thanks!

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izak30
This is exactly what I have been looking for. This is a HUGE missing feature
in Mint.

This is the way that I want to plan my budget, my expenses, and to see what
buying an iMac today will look like to my grocery budget over the next 30 days
:)

I've been wanting to mock this up myself, but I haven't, only because I didn't
want to mess with the recurring profiles on the dates, and it's worthless
without that.

I would say that the only thing that would make this more valuable would be if
I can plug in a budget for variable expenses (Gas, Electric, Petrol) and then
change that when I get/pay the bill.

~~~
MarkEirich
I'm glad you like it!

There is a way you can budget for variable expenses. Simply set up a recurring
transaction. On the Dashboard page, you can edit an individual instance of the
recurring transaction without affecting the others. So when you actually
receive your electric bill, you can put in the exact amount and date.

If you need more help, please drop me a line at
<https://cashcurveapp.com/help>

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abalashov
Good stuff!

We actually _are_ a service provider in the sense that our income is split
approximately equally between projects and recurring support/maintenance, so
this can definitely help us frame cash flow in terms of our recurring revenue.
I try to budget exclusively from that and not count on project revenue since
it so volatile and difficult to predict.

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nickpinkston
I love the concept, pitch page, and cleanliness. I'll just add though that I
hate getting initial passwords in the current format. I'd prefer a random
word/number set "fastdog123". I know that's nit picking, but it's sort of a
humanness element that gives me warmfuzies247.

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thirdusername
I'd want to switch from dollar into something else. An option to set the
(multi-character) symbol and if it's pre- or post-fix could probably cover
most cases.

~~~
izak30
This could also be resolved by ignoring (removing) the $ symbol altogether.
It's not as if any actual currency calculations are happening, just decimal
arithmetic.

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hsuresh
Registration seems to be broken at the moment.

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known
Awesome.

