A new Web application launching today promises to be the small business answer to Mint.com.
InDinero, a four-person startup funded in part by venture firm YCombinator, offers a real-time financial dashboard that hooks into a company’s existing bank accounts and displays key business metrics like cash balance, income, spending and profit, among many other things.
Much like the popular personal finance software Mint.com, InDinero also shows trends over time with simple, colorful charts, and enables users to analyze and categorize bank transactions. Far from being just a clone of Mint, InDinero specializes in offering financial analysis tools to businesses specifically.
“Businesses care about very different things than consumers,” InDinero co-founder Jessica Mah told us. Whereas personal finance may focus on savings and investments, small businesses are more interested in data like cash runway and profits and loss statements.
Mah and her team are offering InDinero as a freemium product, with three plans, based on the number of transactions per month (50 for free, 500 for $29.95 per month, unlimited for $99.95).
Another advantage that Mah perceives InDinero as having over consumer products is ease of integration with financial accounts. Historically, smaller, local banks and credit unions have been slower to integrate with the Yodelee platform used by Mint.com and now InDinero. Since most companies tend to use bigger banks, Mah hopes this will translate into fewer headaches on the integration front.
“I’ve been thinking about this column since I was in middle school,” says Mah, who recently graduated from UC Berkley’s computer science program at age 19. “I was selling stuff on Ebay and I had no idea how much money I was actually making.”
Mah worked with co-founder and fellow UC Berkley grad Andy Su to build the core of the application last summer, before applying for venture funding through YCombinator, which approved their application in April 2010.
The site currently has a few hundred beta testers, about 80 of which are paid customers.
Although the site just launched, a new feature is already being planned for late July: automated financial forecasts. By combining user data with data from the IRS and other public sources, InDinero will be able to help companies predict cash flow in advance.
The InDinero team is also looking at launching mobile apps, although no timeline has been set.
