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How are you guys making sure people remain involved in overseeing and understanding the financials your software's feeding into?
Hey guys! One of the co-founders of Sway Finance here. We did a ShowHN a couple months ago when we had just built our Slackbot ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162283 ) and are excited to now be in YC and building more full-fledged financial products for businesses. Happy to answer any questions here!
Edit to add: also interested in having a system that can project based on previous expenses to help with cash flow forecasting. It's insane that with 3 years of nicely classified data in xero we still have to more or less manually figure out what the next few months look like.
Hey guys! One of the co-founders of Sway Finance here. We did a ShowHN a couple months ago when we had just built our Slackbot ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11162283 ) and are excited to now be in YC and building more full-fledged financial products for businesses. Happy to answer any questions here!
This looks great, and automated revenue recognition straight into Quickbooks is a great feature. Do you have a Braintree integration yet, or soon? The integration section suggests not quite yet...
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This looks great, and automated revenue recognition straight into Quickbooks is a great feature. Do you have a Braintree integration yet, or soon? The integration section suggests not quite yet...
Is the Quickbooks integration with online or desktop or both?
So, is it safe to say that you are providing a better rules engine than Quickbooks provides? What about all the other stuff - A/P, A/R, GL, Financial Reports etc?
For the other pieces of bookkeeping, we're using integrations to automatically match invoices/payments (especially disjointed ones, eg invoice through QBO but pay separate via Stripe on client's website). We're also doing stuff like adjusting journal entries programmatically, like payroll accruals. For now, QB is providing the financial reports, we're doing the bookkeeping so their automated reports are accurate!
We're basically doing the services that a bookkeeper would provide on top of a client's Quickbooks software. QB is a tool and we aim to be a service.
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We're using machine learning (supervised learning) to categorize transactions, generally expenses. We're using our users' past months' books as our training sets of correctly labelled data, so that we can use that data to train is really exciting for us!
How is this better than what say Xero does for reconciliation?
One of the big issues I see with accounting/reconciliation systems (automated or even if managed by an external bookkeeper)is that if there isn't good oversight there's a significant cleanup cost usually at a pretty inconvenient time (e.g. just before a due diligence or audit). It's a pretty painful form of infrastructure debt. How are you guys making sure people remain involved in overseeing and understanding the fi…
We're using our Slackbot as a friendly way for companies to get their financial data, the idea being that if the numbers are accessible/convenient and ones they want to know (revenue, burn rate, bank balances). Then, we can use the same Slackbot to provide other necessary financial details.
We're still working on this, but we think Gusto does a great job of communicating necessary (and not so exciting) info in a way that engages us.
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How is this better than what say Xero does for reconciliation?
Xero and Quickbooks just use basic regex to match transactions, which doesn't make much sense if the transaction category isn't static, eg Amazon. We also learn categories on an aggregate level, so if your bank statement's never seen a transaction from, say Tommy's Tacos, but someone else has, we'll be able to categorize it correctly immediately.