Expense Hub

A few years ago, I was part of a growing business, Great people, solid revenue. I always had the dream to start something of my own (coming from a middle class family with service based history), I started a home improvement business as a side hustle which included drop shipping on major ecommerce and offline trading as well. So i was hustling 9-7 on my day job, then 10-2 and weekends on my side hustle.
Target was to make profit equal to my current salary in order to move full time.
4 months down the line, my business started growing but the finances became a mess. I ordered a new SKU and was waiting on my reimbursement for last quarter to fulfill that payment (this is what we all do, fuel side hustle using full time gig's payment). I was preparing for sales, campaigning, connecting with local retailers but the on the day when manufacturer asked for upfront payment, I did not had that but still borrowed it from friend and told them that my reimbursement got delayed and he replied that yes it happens too often in his company as well, this was my 'How I met your ExpenseHub' first meeting.

I told him that Finance team has asked me to submit the expenses again as they had technical and compliance issue, and he told me that they are using paper forms, his roommate who was a Associate Finance Manager was working in the same company and his job was to sort expenses of employees along with other duties but was working atleast 3 weeks a month in sorting expenses only, and got so fed up that he started to look for another job.
I told him to ask his roommate about the tool that my company was using, it would make his life easy, to which his roommate later replied, that my company is small and cannot afford 11$ per user for expenses management.
11$ per user for expense management! What? I did not knew that although I was using it for quiet some time. It never occurred to me to deep dive in the tool my company was making me use. But still I chose to do nothing and moved on.
Fast forward a month, I was doing basic accounting for my side hustle and since I was using excel, I had to go to and fro for all the bills, spent and invoices etc. It felt like I was duct-taping together Google Sheets, email threads, and outdated software (it was free) just to close the books.
Third time, similar issue, I thought to talk to my Finance Controller (as she was a good friend, joined on the same day as I did, I knew her husband out of work and she was hard working).
In this conversation, where I told her the problem I am facing in my side hustle and the expense delay issue that happened and all other stuff, she said yes these are pretty common and then she opened my sheet etc and after 10 min of gazing through numbers she told me that I am going to incur loss even after I sell all my SKU because my expenses and spends are not tied up in my pricing which is making my margins low (negative). She explained it to me and then I realised it as the basic mistake I did.
I misplaced invoices, never tracked my spends and I ended up on bad side of business.
I went back, corrected everything but then my pricing went ahead of what other competition was offering and I became obsolete (my products did).
Question: If i had known that calculation and tracked my expenses, then would that still have happened? Well may be, but then it would have been a calculated risk.
With all those learning and my finance manager friend, I went on to build an expense management tool for businesses.

I hired freelancers, I had a subject matter expert, made this my side hustle, closed my other business, went into silence mode and now I am launching it.

Expense Hub (www.expensehub.io) - more efficient, more budget friendly.