Indinero – Business Finance Done Simple
Financial software is as old as the computer itself. There are bookkeeping and financial apps ranging from your home personal use to large corporate structures involving multiple transactions per minute. Managing money is the foremost concern of most corporate applications.
Indinero.com is a new app designed to make the job of tracking and dealing with finances easier and faster. Obviously, it’s not the first app to come along and promise this and I doubt it will be the last either.
Aimed specifically at the small business, Indinero focuses primarily on dollar tracking and highlighting the small payments that can ad up to a big impact for the business. With most software, or when doing your books by hand, this is the hardest and (usually) most overlooked part of dollar-and-cent savings available to the small enterprise.
Here’s how it works: first, you integrate your financial accounts with Indinero. This means connecting your banking and credit card accounts to the app (including PayPal) so that it can keep continually updated with transactions on all fronts. The app then produces graphs and analytics based on those numbers to show you what you’ve been spending.
You can then go into specific transactions to mark them as “monthly bills,” “regular payments,” or similar and Indinero will then send you regular reminders about approaching billing dates and so forth.
That sounds extremely simple, and it is, but most financial software requires either that the company be using its own tracking (i.e. have an accounts department) or that the user manually download and integrate data into it from the company’s various accounts.
The question is: will you trust Indinero to access your accounts for you? Or would you prefer to have control and manually retrieve the data for your software? This is a good question and one that anyone planning to use Indinero would have to answer. It is, after all, a startup that only went live a few weeks ago.
The company behind Indinero is a startup venture in Redwood City, California (Indinero, Inc.). It’s initial funding came from a grant through Lightspeed Venture Partners and the app debuted at Startup Weekend in San Francisco this year. The co-founders of Indinero are Jessica Mah and Andy Su.
It is possible to set up a free account and enter test data without linking to accounts, so you can at least try before you buy and make a real commitment to the app. Personally, I think that the marketing for this one needs to focus as much on their reliability and trustworthiness than it does on the app’s abilities. I would be leary with giving out sensitive financial data to anyone, especially a new startup company.
All of that said, the app itself is very impressive and gives a lot of insight. So it’s definitely worth trying, even if you never give it access to your financial data directly.
