What accounting software do you use to manage your business finances?
I created this product Pesatime (http://pesatime.com/) which is a super simple online accounting software targeting small business and I was wondering:
- if its a solution that can help you track your business finances. Give it a try for free.
- Which tools do you currently use to do book keeping?
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Sorry but I have to be honest with you. I hate to discourage people but I dont want you to spend too much time on something that will not give you the return you wanted. maybe put your effort in something else or do more research of your competitors before starting a project.
Check the points below:
1- You are competing against huge players such as quickbooks (starting at 4.5 USD per month), freshbooks (starting at 15 USD per month), Zoho books (starting at 10 USD per month).
So in your case how much are you willing to charge for your software? Why would people choose to use your software vs the other well known names? I dont see you have invoicing option, why would I use your software if I cant send invoices to customers?
If you are targeting freelancers and just beginner people, then they dont need your API integration, all the existing solution provide a GUI integration without writing a single line of code to their customers.
2- majority of small businesses use accounting to simplify their taxation reporting, integrate software to their business banking/credit or debit cards so that all the expenses are in one place.
Do you support tax calculation for US, UK, VAT (Middle East) or what exactly is your model? Also which banks do you support out of the box right now? What integrations that you can provide that existing solutions do not have? Check the list of integration partners for freshbooks:
https://www.freshbooks.com/integrations/pages
If you still want to do this project (which I advise against), then I suggest that you look at how quickbooks makes user onboarding straightforward and how they focus on what small business need from accounting software:
https://www.useronboard.com/how-quickbooks-onboards-new-users/
Thanks for your valuable feedback and I totally agree on some of your points however I tend to disagree on the competitors part of it, reason being..
Looking at the reasons as to why I started Pesatime, I mentioned in the beta launch post that It was entirely driven by a need to track revenue and get a realtime business snapshot from the type of business I am running. None of these online accounting software would give me that. Majority are Invoice/ external client driven payments.
Summary of the reason is a follows:
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I am from East Africa (Kenya - where [Eliud Kipchoge] the guy who broke the 2hr 42km marathon record comes from :) ) and majority of my customers use Mobile money (M-PESA) to be precise for payments.
I happen to be running a music platform - www.kambamusic.com - and almost 99% of all the payments come from M-PESA. It's a commission based business which means I get a percentage of whatever is paid as revenue. There are a bunch of expenses attached to this revenue including sms costs, telephone bills, event travel expenses, servers, marketing costs, daily office expenses etc and we are only 2 of us. I work from a totally different country and its only 1 very awesome artist/marketing guy who works from our small office in Nairobi.
With this kind of setup, I needed to have a total visibility of our finances. Money was coming in from payment platform and the expenses on the other side. Some of these expenses were to be reimbursed. Zoho Expenses was abit close to what we wanted but they had another complication on it - Select merchant (Which doesn't apply to our case as well).
I ended up creating a Google sheet to manage all these but couldn't do daily updates because I had a butch of other tasks to work on as well.
Thats when I created super simple accounting application for this then after using it for 2 months, I decided to package it as a SAAS product.
Check post on Indiehackers here (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/pesatime/mvp-beta-launch-simple-accounting-software--LrmGBRywaG2eub7dd3m).
Pricing
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I haven't thought so much on the pricing bit of it because the product just launched as beta and I haven't pivoted so for now I cant actually give you a figure. But the lower side with be 5 USD /month
Integration to credit/debit cards
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As mentioned, majority of the business in my primary target use mobile money and almost 90% of banks around here hasn't gotten into that level of third party integrations into their core banking solutions.
Tax calculations
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As of now, nope, but in the future yes. The primary focus for now is to get an oversight of your business(P/L ). VAT laws are different in each country so when the right time comes and we get businesses requesting for that, that will be the best time.
Landing page
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I can't say I have done quite a good job with the landing page but I have some good heatmaps(from hotjar) in place to make sure that I can refresh it as we go along. Just wanted a simple page that showcases what the product is, what it does and a CTA button to try it out.
It was a 5hr job though :)
To conclude
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I believe I have been able to shed light on some of the decisions I made.
If you need more clarification or have some comments, please let me know.
Thanks alot.