CashFlow forecasting for small businesses and freelancers | Hacker News Reader

CashFlow forecasting for small businesses and freelancers

wisecashhq.com

49 pointsjaimeiniesta28 comments

Open articleView on HN

Hi there - I'm the guy behind WiseCash (SaaS service, in beta since July).

The homepage is not yet ready for the general public, nor for a "Show HN"!

I'll happily answer questions though.

Here's an internal newsletter archive if you want to have an quick look inside though:

https://www.wisecashhq.com/newsletters/acquiring-more-financ...

Here are a couple more screenshots:

https://img.skitch.com/20121016-bjwqug4i7kymcaakc843y8b1kx.j...

https://img.skitch.com/20120722-rwkkn37g2p53stndgttbxsgqma.j...

Looks like a cool product!

If I could make one suggestion; if possible, you shouldn't be showing screenshots forecasting loss/deficit. It might not be rational, but finance is so important that even fictional losses are not pleasant to look at. It's sort of the equivalent of having unhappy faces in your stock art.

There's a reason the Google finance favicon is steadily increasing graph!

Thanks! WiseCash is a labor of love for sure - glad you like it!

It's a very good suggestion and it has deep ramifications.

Mostly: the divide between people without a recurring income, and the others.

Most freelancers I've talked to have planned expenses, but planned income, not so much.

This results in this typical graph :)

I'd like to encourage people to think about creating more recurring income over time. The time-wealth WiseCash computes is a good way to spare some time to build a SaaS product, for instance.

So thanks a ton for this comment, it really got me thinking!

I will very likely use more positive screenshots in the end, and will work on encouraging people to reach that situation where they have a growing chart.

Hi there, quick question: do you have any support for eCommerce or are you just about burn rates for other SaaS companies? The trickiest part is figuring out "okay, we can do $10k this week in new products" after counting our sales rate, burn rate, amount of credit available (via credit cards, etc), and how much we owe licensors.

There is no integration so far with external tools. Here is how it works:

You enter the planned expenses and income (using recurrence rules, monthly, quarterly, weekly etc), either based on already known bills to come or on projections.

Once it's done, you get:

- a burn chart which will show your cashflow level over time for the coming year, day by day

- a computation of your "time-wealth" and "crash date" if you provide your bank account balance

- a monthly break-down of expenses and income

- the ability to zoom on a specific account

- a dashboard showing the upcoming (2 weeks) transactions and the cashflow totals at 30, 60 and 90 days

- a weekly email reminder of upcoming transactions (so you don't miss any / pay late fees)

The tool focuses on the future and the present (rather than tracking the past), and on providing useful metrics and information to take informed decisions for freelancers and small business owners.

The goal here is to provide peace of mind and control for those small businesses.

See https://www.wisecashhq.com/newsletters/acquiring-more-financ... for an outline of benefits.

Hope this clarify things a bit!

The screenshots look great. I like that you support Euro (and will hopefully do dollar and other currencies too) - just make sure you get the commas and periods localized well ( http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/10/jquery-glo... ). The bootstrap UI looks sleek but I recommend styling the buttons to make it look slightly more customized than the default bootstrap CSS.

Also, you should check out my free app: https://zetabee.com/cashflow/ (see the demo and update the dates/amounts to play around). It has similar features and is very much like the original spreadsheet I used myself. It has burn rate (balance), monthly (income vs. expense), and many other views/lists.

My biggest feature request has been multiple simulations/forecasts so users can do what-if scenarios. Also the ability to easily ignore/disable rules with one-click to help with this. Either I get the new car or don't. Check/uncheck to see how it impacts the future. I've been very busy with my other projects and have not updated this app in over two years. I hope you guys can incorporate these features into your app so I can forward the heavy users to you. Good luck!

> The bootstrap UI looks sleek but I recommend styling the buttons to make it look slightly more customized than the default bootstrap CSS.

I'd think it'd be a much better use of their time to improve the product, especially seeing as how they don't think it's ready to be released.

The number of people who have any idea what bootstrap is or looks like is dwarfed, by orders of magnitude, by people involved with small businesses and freelancing. So unless you're targeting snooty design folks who get offended that someone would sully their site with bootstrap, get on with the features!

Given that I bootstrapped the service on my own saved time, bootstrap was an easy choice, just like knockout.js, dotcloud (hosting), recurly (billing).

I really wanted to avoid a born-dead app, and leveraging bootstrap and these other tools was very encouraging.

On the couple hundred of beta-testers, nobody complained about bootstrap, unsurprisingly :)

Thanks for your comment and the good luck, too! Glad you like the screenshots.

Simulations are definitely on my roadmap, along with an API to let people extend the app themselves, and much more.

Euro, dollar and more currencies are supported, it's just "one currency at once" for now.

On bootstrap, localization etc: as this is a bootstrapped service (I'm a freelancer), I wanted to keep a very low overhead of development for now, so I pretty much removed everything I could remove, and leveraged existing stuff as I could.

I will work on a better/more polished UI, localization etc once we (my wife-associate and I) become profitable.

I'll have a look at your app, thanks a lot!

This looks fantastic! Cash flow has been a major pain point for me, and quite an unexpected one with a rapidly growing apparel company (https://www.kigu.me).

We've been managing this using a spreadsheet but tracking loan repayments, stock purchases, postage, cost of sale and salaries as well as picking a useful scale (daily vs weekly) has been a real challenge.

I can't wait for an invite.

Hey - I'm inviting you this afternoon! Thanks.

Looks really interesting. As a freelancer/writer I sometimes don't know how much to charge and I've never found it easy to manage my cashflow.

Looking forward to receiving an invite to the beta :)

Will invite you this afternoon so you get an idea! Cheers.

The splash page is leaving a lot of questions in my mind, and the invitation to give my email address (just to find out more) is a bit of a speedbump. Reading the comments in HN I can see other people asking how your service works.

My suggestion is to take your answers to those questions and use them on the front page to provide a bit more information to hook potential customers like myself.

I totally understand and do agree! This wasn't meant to be posted on HN as is (although the app is up and running since July at least, with people using it daily).

The splash page is a placeholder I put in place a long while back and it does not explain at all what you'll get inside the app (and what you won't get).

A proper home page (with detailing benefits, features, privacy policy, pricing, and a screencast) is on its way.

Thanks for taking the time to underline this :)

I'm glad to see this here. I've been a beta user and it's really helped me get a good view of how far into the future money will take me.

Glad it helped :)

I didn't look closely, but if this product builds a direct-method cash flow statement from a balance sheet - then you've got a winner. Quickbooks - the default small business accounting product - does a HORRIBLE job with the cash flow statement.

Once WiseCash becomes profitable, I plan to work on automating data extraction from various tools (like QuickBooks, FreshBooks etc most likely), either as a first time setup or a full sync process.

I think WiseCash will complement those tools nicely.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I'm using it as a beta user, and I find it really helpful.

I used to do this kind of things with a spreadsheet, but this tool automates it and gives you nice charts.

Glad you like WiseCash!

We (my wife and I, co-founders) also used a spreadsheet a long while back and it got fairly hairy.

We built WiseCash both to create a secondary income apart from freelancing and to help out people get more freedom like we managed to.

sorry i have not signed up yet but how do you get the required data to create the forecast ? I mean are you using an automated aggregrator (like yodlee etc.) to pull bank details, credit card info etc ?

WiseCash (currently) requires that you input the planned expenses and income (using recurrence rules).

It makes no attempt (for now at least) to pull existing data from sources.

I will work on that topic once we are profitable though.

hard to tell from the screenshots but do you or would you consider adding a weekly look at cash flow vs. only monthly? looks like a nice product in the making though :)

I will work on choosing different scales on all charts, including:

- weekly vs monthly on the "breakdown" chart https://img.skitch.com/20120722-rwkkn37g2p53stndgttbxsgqma.j...

- 12 weeks view instead of yearly view on the "burn down" chart https://www.wisecashhq.com/newsletters/20121013-mjckb43qgm6k...

It's definitely a "baby product" in the making - I want to make it grow a lot :) Thanks for the suggestion!

If you're still giving some priority to HN users… /raises hand

I'm working on an "onboarding screencast" to avoid blowing up under support, then I'll invite pretty much everyone who left their mail (so 487 people, so far :-).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com