I manage retail operations, manage costs and pricing, advise and lead a financial team of accountants, formulate data streams and reports and create visuals that give structure to the data noise on a daily basis that gives us the ability to make decisions. One of our biggest issues is confirming that data is congruent across multiple platforms and then understanding what is happening, answering the question did we actually get paid what we think we got paid and for what we think we should be paid for what we sold. It's too many views across too many places.
With Incleus I tried to make it as simple as possible, one invoice acts as the place to look and update, so you look at your bank statement for payments and then update the invoice, or you use an integrated payment method and it updates the invoice automatically, that feature isn't free, the payment facilitator like stripe charges their transaction fee and we charge a small fee for updating the invoice. Invoices get grouped by customer so you have their payment history, how long they take to pay things on a regular basis, if they've paid on time and it flags invoices that are over due based on the terms you've set. It even handles partial payments so if you charge a deposit or need to add a fee you simply add a line and resend the invoice. The flow is easy as well, from quote to bill and the tax payable will be suggested on the quote as well so the customer doesn't get shocked when the totals match.
As a paid feature we give access to our automatic tax calculator, which will calculate based on the product identifier you choose in the catalog, think of a tax code but user friendly, so if you are billing across jurisdictions and don't know the taxes to charge on an item in a different province or country, don't worry we have you covered. Other wise if you are operating in one place and know the tax you need to charge on a catalog item you can do it manually, i.e. you might not need the paid tax calculator feature.
Lastly if you are every worried about cancelled payments or disputes, the service will automatically update any that were paid via payment link over supported providers.
The “one invoice acts as the place to look and update” idea makes a lot of sense given the mess you described across banks, payments and accounting systems. The partial payment and overdue history bits feel especially grounded in real operations.
Feels like Incleus could be pulling in a lot more organic traffic than it is right now. At the looking-for-users stage that could be pretty interesting for seeing which pain actually pulls people in.
Are you finding the tax side or the payment reconciliation side gets people more curious?
I'd think the payment reconciliation side. Getting traffic to incleus seems to be an issue currently. I need test users so I can get feedback on actual implementation and how it acts in the real world, so I can make further improvements and it can grow.
The strongest part is the “one invoice as the source of truth” idea. The problem isn’t invoicing itself; it’s reconciling payments, terms, partial payments, and what was actually collected across disconnected systems.