HOW INDINERO DASHBOARD HELPS SMALL BUSINESSES MANAGE THEIR FINANCES

Twenty-year-old entrepreneur Jessica Mah, freshly graduated from the University of California, Berkley, has just closed a $1.2 million round of angel financing for her startup software firm, InDinero. A simple online finance management tool, InDinero aims to do for small businesses what Intuit’s Mint.com online finance manager does for individuals — bring fiscal order out of chaos.

This is the not Mah’s first waltz around the floor at the entrepreneur’s ball; she started her first company selling website templates on eBay when she was 13, two years before she graduated  from high school. And she founded two more while an undergraduate studying computer science at Berkley.

Like many innovations, InDinero came about when Mah recognized she had a problem with finances at her first company.

“I didn’t know how much I was making or spending,” she told BusinessNewsDaily.

Her dilemma was not uncommon. Most small business owners try to measure the financial health of their company by scanning Excel files and bank statements and listening to their bookkeeper, if they have one. The results are usually spotty, at best.

There was no solution at the time that allowed for her to automatically monitor her company's finances. The problem gestated in Mah’s mind for six years. In 2009 she and a partner, Andy Su, began cobbling together a solution that would use data from bank statements and credit card companies to create an application that would let business owners know how they were doing.

InDinero provides small business owners a dashboard that lets them track, model and forecast their finances in real time. Unlike Intuit’s Quickbooks application for small business, InDinero can instantly project a company’s income and spending based on past patterns and serve as an early warning alarm for cash-flow-sensitive companies that may be on the brink of heading into the red.

The goal for Mah and Su was to produce a lower-cost application that would be a more intuitive and accessible alternative to QuickBooks. They were aiming directly at business owners, not their accountants.

“Intuit’s secret sauce is the accountant,” Mah said. “InDinero’s secret sauce is the entrepreneur.”

InDinero is rapidly gaining attraction with small business owners. Today, InDinero has a user base of 5,000, up from 2,000 only a month ago. Most of the customers use the free 50-transactions-per-month plan, she said, but the company has also found a number of takers who have opted for a 500-transaction-per month plan for $29.95 and an unlimited transactions plan for $99.95 a month.

For the time being, Mah thinks that her entrepreneurial roaming may be over and that she will call InDinero her professional home for the foreseeable future. Cashing in and selling the company, a well-worn path that many software entrepreneurs have gone down, is not on her radar.

“My hope is to stay with InDinero forever,” she said. “If we got bought out any time soon, I don’t have confidence that the new owners would finish solving the problem. It’s not just a single problem.”

The recent infusion of angel capital has put the five-person operation on sound financial footing, Mah said.

“It’s very likely we won’t have to have another round of funding,” she said. “We’re ramen profitable.”

COMMENTARY:   I quickly reviewed InDinero's small business financial dashboard, and it's really slick, but with only 5,000 users (the majority using the free service), Jessica Mah has her work cutout for her with heavy competition from some very well established behemoths in small business accounting and financial management software:

Mint - 3,000,000 users worldwide

Intuit Quickbooks - 3.5 million users worldwide (300,000 online users)

Intuit Quicken - 10  million users worldwide

For my money, I recommend WorkingPoint, an SaaS accounting service founded by two former Intuit executives that charges $10 per month and you get accounting, invoicing, expense management, import/export, financial reporting, tax reporting, contact management, inventory management, cash management, online company profile and a dashboard.  WorkingPoint also includes firewall protection, SSL encryption, data backups, unlimited users, unlimited customers, payment collections through PayPal and recurring invoicing plans.

Courtesy of an article dated October 24, 2010 appearing in Business News Daily

Comments

[Tommy]

I doubted Jessica Mah's chances of succeeding, but it appears that there is a large enough niche for a very basic, trouble free finance app. She may never grow the business to the size of Quickbooks, but make a decent living and payback on investment.

[Darcy Grubaugh]

It's quite unbelievable that the brainchild behind inDinero's success is a twenty-year-old fresh graduate. The software's surface is pretty nice, and it seems very user-friendly. My sister actually uses inDinero in her small clothing business, and she says the dashboard has it all.

[records management]

I've seen a web based financial tool before. It looks pretty serious. I will run it by my boss. Thanks for sharing.