Ever since Mint.com launched a simple and intuitive site for individuals to track their personal finances, many small business owners have been looking for a similar service or tool to track their finances. While there are plenty of finance tools available on the market, most mom and pop businesses don’t need the firepower of Quickbooks accounting software on a day-to-day basis. Reducing the complexity and confusion of small business finances is why Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Jessica Mah and Andy Su, decided to launch inDinero.
Think of inDinero as an easy-to-use financial dashboard that allows an owner to spend less than 5 minutes a day understanding the vital signs of their business. While inDinero is not meant to replace a professional tax accountant, the service gives owners insight into their day-to-day cash flow, transaction history, spending trends and budget goals. Setting an account up is simple and just takes a few steps.
Low volume businesses are in luck. inDinero has a free pricing plan for businesses that have less than 50 transactions per month. Otherwise, there are two other pricing plans: 500 transactions for $29.95/month or unlimited transactions for $99.95/month. Once registered, inDinero guides an owner through a series of steps to import their business financial data from their bank, credit cards, PayPal and FreshBooks. As soon as the accounts are uploaded, the business owner’s financial dashboard comes alive.
The financial dashboard provides a series of charts illustrating the cash flow of the business, which is arguably the most important view into the health of a small business. An owner can then sort by bank accounts, credit cards, incoming money and outgoing money to help identify any glaring pain points or unusual activity in any given month. After further breaking down their cash flow in the trends section of the dashboard, owners can drill down even deeper. The transaction section includes individual transactions, invoices and bills, all of which can be edited if the automatic labels and categories need tweaking.
While the charts and graphs might be pretty to look at, the financial health of their business serve as a wake up call to some owners. That’s why inDinero introduced a simple budget section to help owners reel in their spending and get their business finances back on track. inDinero sets an initial budget for each spending area based on the uploaded financial data, but owners can edit the budget for each category to their liking.
The best part about inDinero is that everything is fully automated, as long owners are diligent and synch all of their accounts with the service. Not only does this save a tremendous amount of time by eliminating manual data entry, the aggregated transaction data can be exported into a CSV file. This simple option alone will make any business’s tax accountant very happy.
This brings us to our final point. inDinero is a powerful service that provides owners a well-organized view into their finances, but it is ultimately up to the owner to use the insights from their financial dashboard to control spending and increase profitability. After all, isn’t the goal of every entrepreneur to create a successful and profitable business?
-To contact the writer on this story: Philip Nowak in Chicago at philip.nowak@firmology.com.
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