1. How are you different than the other companies offering SaaS accounting services (i.e. Freshbooks, Xero, Quickbooks, Indinero all come to mind but there are others)?
2. Understand you are just getting started, but the website is very basic and, not to be rude, doesn't make me feel like I am working with a secure business.
3. There is no privacy policy, terms of service, pricing, or anything that would make me feel secure in sending you my data, especially my accounting data.
4. The benefit of an accounting platform is not having to manage reports, billing, or end of year numbers to do taxes. This seems like I would have to do a lot of development to build an accounting package around my own data. What is the benefit to me? If I hook into the Freshbooks API I can log into their site and see nice reports, handle billing, etc...
1. A lot of the existing services are clunky and their API offerings are hard (though not impossible!) to use -- making them hard to interface with online applications. But for the most part, these are accounting software suites designed for a general audience, with an API offered. If you have a lot of microtransactions to process, or your application requires some financial logic baked in (gift cards, marketplace payouts, detailed account receipts for a insurance/co-pay splits, etc), having an API can help greatly.
Additionally, our API is being designed with specific developer use cases in mind: general use cases like subscription billing, sane integrations with payment gateways like Stripe and Braintree, online invoicing, and tax reporting will be designed around online businesses and Saas applications. Again, software like QuickBooks is designed to be broadly used, and thus, may be harder for you to get started in (especially if you do not have an accountant handy). The API will always support general use (you can do whatever you want with the API!), but developer abstractions will be top-of-mind.
2, 3. I hear you and thank you for the concerns. These are all things that definitely need to be done before opening the product up.
4. Here are some benefits I see:
- real-time financial stats that are updated as the transactions are made, and not just whenever the transactions are reconciled — and can be used (and understand) by everyone from the CFO to the accountant to the engineers
- generate real-time account statements for users, just like your bank is able to provide you — you can control how much data you show to users using your own internal business logic
- a secure financial data store that you can send GET requests to whenever you need the data. Examples where I see this doing well include in-app currencies and credit systems, gift cards, managing marketplaces and seller payouts, managing receipts, showing users detailed account statements, sales tax management, etc.
- write scripts, perform analytics, and use the data/certain subsets of the data as you wish — it'll be much easier to export and analyze this data than with other software
- saves you engineering time from building your own financial infrastructure, or trying to hook it up to other accounting software suites
Also, more reporting endpoints (http://scribesend.com/docs#reports) will be added soon!
Obviously, we're not 100% of the way there yet, but hopefully this clears things up a bit.
Am I missing something?
Friends/potential customers haven't asked for taxes yet so not all (crucial) features have been added in just yet. That's what this post is here to expose :) Are there any other glaring omissions you see?
- I would suggest to add support for fixed value taxes along with percentages.
- Items need to have a SKU field of some sort.
