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Comment by juecd | Hacker News Reader

We made a Slackbot for startups to tell them some simple financial metrics (how much is in their bank account, and what their latest transactions in those accounts are). We're connecting to company accounts through Plaid (plaid.com) and sending them a financial 'digest' through Slack/email each morning.

As consumers we've been using a couple apps like Digit (digit.co) to track our personal finances but couldn't find a push-based version for companies. Logging into our company bank accounts to keep track of transactions has been pretty painful (online business banking UI is really hard to navigate) so hopefully this can make the process easier.

We want to eventually incorporate burn-rate to help founders stay on top of their company's money. Would love any feedback -- thanks!

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I'm a founder and the guy in charge of the $$$. This sentence doesn't resonate for me: "Logging into our company bank accounts to keep track of transactions has been pretty painful (online business banking UI is really hard to navigate) so hopefully this can make the process easier."

If you've already tested your target customer segment and found that they find this to be "pretty painful", then you can conclude that I'm an outlier. If you have not already done customer discovery, I'd encourage you to check whether this is actually a pain point you can market to. I've found our bank's website to be pretty quick and easy to navigate.

I agree with the above. This seems like a "neat to have", but not a huge productivity enhancer.

I'm seeing more and more apps like this. It's telling me that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked in this technology cycle and entrepreneurs are looking desperately for unoccupied niches to fill.

I agree - navigating Quickbooks or a bank website is not that hard if one uses them on a daily basis.

We've used a couple banks ourselves and have talked to people using other ones, we've found them pretty hard to navigate. Some people are using consumer bank accounts at the early stage so it might be easier to use.

Appreciate the feedback, we'll keep testing around this.

Kinda hard to trust company accounts with an external service like this. Is there a way to just give you a downloaded CSV or something for this?

If not – how are you managing security?

We're using Plaid to connect to accounts so we're not storing any credentials ourselves. For security when we pull the info to give to people in the digest each morning we're not persisting it anywhere.

Interesting point about the CSV (giving us information without bank access); a problem with that though is it defeats the 'push' based idea of giving people information without them having to do any work. Atleast on the consumer side we've found that many people don't keep track of their money because it's too much effort to log in and manually get that information.

Thanks for the feedback!

You're not storing credentials, but you do store financial data?

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