InDinero (YC S10) sees huge market for small-business expense tracking | Hacker News Reader

InDinero (YC S10) sees huge market for small-business expense tracking

xconomy.com

64 pointswaderoush10 comments

Isn't that what Excel is for? Seriously... I worked for a company that was developing a web app for small businesses for their business processes, and its amazing (and appalling) how many small businesses use Excel spreadsheets for everything.

Even now I work on a product that manages data, and all the customers think a "data export" is a CSV file. I've run into some folks who think the app stores its data in "special spreadsheets"!

And frankly most small businesses don't care that Excel spreadsheets aren't all that great. They work well enough. The market has an education problem more than anything.

There are definite advantages of dedicated software over spreadsheets (as a spreadsheet grows it comes to resemble software more and more anyway, so why build software that yourself?), but you're right about the education problem.

I use FreeAgent, a UK-centric product similar to InDinero, and the tagline for their very successful referral program is "free someone you know from spreadsheet hell".

QuickBooks proper is nasty, but one very compelling reason many businesses use it is that you can hand over your "QuickBooks file" to almost any accounting firm; they can do your taxes or solve an accounting problem.

This is hugely valuable for companies like mine that don't have full time accountants but do have an office manager that does bookkeeping.

I wish this company the best of luck, but I'm not sure how much room their is between firms that are outgrowing spreadsheets but don't yet need something a big accounting firm will also use.

"Ultimately, Mah lacked the funds to keep buying equipment ahead of demand, and shut the company down."

They couldn't keep up with demand, so they shut it down?

This is Jessica from inDinero. We didn't run out of funds. All in all a great article.

Jessica, I signed-up about 3 months ago. It took me quite a while to decide or not to give you my Paypal password, but I did. I had a problem with my account (Paypal being in Spain) because you had a problem with the dots and commas. The app thought I had 14.000$ when in reality I had 14.00$ (the problem is still there)

I wrote to you about it and never heard back. I left and haven't logged in again.

Is not that the bug was a big deal, is that you expect me to trust you with my money info, and won't even get back at me via email.

Maybe you should look into this.

Overall, I really like your startup. Congratulations!

I can attest that the InDinero team has been super responsive to our small business.

In addition to the prompt & steady flow of email dialogue, Jessica has actually called us a few times to get feedback and they've already started implementing the features we've requested.

Just wanted to share another customer service related experience with them.

-We have absolutely no affiliation with InDinero or any of its employees.

I originally checked it out, but they apparently had some problems with Gmail addresses with + signs in them, which created an infinite loop of log-in prompts. The site looked great though, but I can't really check in every day to see if they fixed it.

I appreciate that I got a response about the nature of the problem after a while, though. (I imagine they had a lot on their plate after InDinero was unveiled.)

Best of luck, though.

I use a receipt document scanner for this. Unless this will categorize and store receipts, I'm not sure how useful it actually is. Paper receipts are a pain point, expense categorization isn't.

I have no way of knowing, but I find the claim that thousands of companies use this product to be highly dubious.

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