fin-ack.com: personal finance accounting
The article is published in this section because it is about a startup in the field of personal finance accounting. To some extent, this is an advertisement of this service. But I also tried to touch upon topics related to startups in general (the second part of the article). In addition, it can be conditionally attributed to the category of lifehack (first part).
Many people believe that they do not keep personal accounting, because they do not have time for this or that this aspect of life is not interesting for them. For some, this is true (but only for some time). But, if you think about it, almost all city dwellers are forced in one form or another to keep records of their finances. The only question is how organized it is and what means are used for this.
By accounting, I mean not scrupulous recording of every expenditure and income, but the whole range of issues of controlling one’s financial position, budget planning, managing one’s assets and liabilities (debts, deposits, loans, etc.), analyzing expenses and incomes. Someone just keeps in mind all this - and forgets at the most critical moment. Someone writes on a piece of paper - and then spends precious time searching for it, when it suddenly becomes necessary to sort out some financial issue that took place a couple of months ago. Again, one or another account is kept by everyone, because in the modern world a lot of relationships and events are tied up for money (from work and study to one’s own home).
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Accounting becomes necessary when a person begins to use a large number of financial products. Even a few deposits already require some kind of decision to manage themselves, and what to say when more loans, investment funds, etc. are added? He must be led by freelancers, private entrepreneurs and businessmen of any kind. Everyone can benefit from accounting because they can better understand their expenses and incomes and draw up a plan for the future. It may be possible to see those areas in which you can save, think about savings and charity. In any book, “How to Get Rich,” it is written that this is the first step towards financial independence.
Of course, many people have realized for themselves the need to keep organized records (and some people are forced to do this or other life circumstances) and are already using some means. For example, I started with plain text files. Most, of course, prefer Excel because of the financial functions built into it. Someone goes further and uses specialized programs for this: GNU Cash, MS Money, Quicken or another one of hundreds of analogues. Many of these programs are written for PDA and offer a huge advantage of being always at hand, but losing functionality ...
This approach is by far the easiest. Is it the most convenient? It all depends on the situation.
I think it is clear that we offer an approach to accounting for finance in the cloud, on the web. He is deprived of the above disadvantages, however, of course, has certain features. Of course, the idea is not original, including in the field of personal finance. When I became interested in this question about 2 years ago, similar systems began to appear. In the west there are probably about a dozen of them. Why do you need another one?
I repeat, everyone probably has examples of how web-based personal information storage means taking work with it to a new level. It's funny to see when colleagues from different companies that use corporate mail lose time and business opportunities due to the fact that when they are out of the office (on business trips or on sick leave) they cannot access it. In the end, all the same, you have to use G- or Y-mail. And how much money do companies have to spend to provide access to corporate mail via the web? .. For me, this killer app once became del.icio.us, which returned me the opportunity to fully and easily use bookmarks. By the way, it was del.icio.us (in its previous incarnation) that was the inspiration in the user interface design for fin-ack.
In the management of small amounts of data, a web service is, as they say, win-win Americans. And development with support is easier and cheaper, and use. Web service benefits from economies of scale. If each of the thousands of users needs to spend 10 minutes on organizing their backup data, even if it takes a developer’s day to work out a complex and reliable backup scheme, these 8 hours still do not compare with the 160 hours spent by each user individually. Also on support.
What is unique about our solution? Of course, I studied what is already there, and also (if possible) people's opinions. They say that the main problem with regard to finance is that people are too lazy to constantly enter their expenses and incomes. The 4konverta system is even based on this assumption. In America, this problem is solved in its own way: since they have 90% of the payments by cards (i.e., cashless), they take information about spending directly from banks, and each system tries to compete on who will better process this information, categorizes it, etc. (In my opinion, this is the release of effort into the wind). Yes, and you are surprised at the credulity of the Americans, who quietly give the authentication data from their account to a third party. Since there have already been scandals with identity theft from any company, starting with AOL ?! Another disadvantage of this approach is that their systems are sharpened by automatic accounting of expenses, so they often do not even have the ability to make them manually (for example, as I recall, this is how the Mint system works).
As a person who introduces his expenses / income, let me disagree with the fact that people are lazy. They are simply not comfortable . And we have several answers to this.
The next major question is security. Many people do not want to store their financial data with third parties. This is both a rational and emotional grain. As for me, personal correspondence is more valuable than financial data (if, of course, you are not engaged in illegal operations), and it has long been migrated to the web. Again, we have several answers to this question:
Importantly, the confidentiality of user data protects the business model of our company. There are a lot of free services on the Internet, but in the field of personal information processing free of charge is often a bad sign. Why? It is clear that the service is not created from altruistic motives, but one way or another to make money. How? Someone may hope for chance: “here we will gather a million users and we will have a queue of buyers”. This means that it is likely that the service will not live long, and will have to look for another. Someone is counting on an advertising model, but in this area it will not work (the user is interested in spending too little time on such sites, not to mention the use of mobile clients, which generally reduce this time to almost no time). More precisely, it can earn when developers are ready to share their users' data with third parties. In short, free cheese is only in a mousetrap, and who, if not people who take into account their finances, do not understand what you have to pay for everything - the only question is whether it is worth it?
We chose a well-proven model in this area (for example, with 37signals projects) of a partially paid system. This means that those features that are truly distinctive will have a small monthly fee. At the same time, the basic accounting system can always be used for free. Moreover, invoices will be issued after 3 months after the fact , i.e. there will be an opportunity to fully try the system during this period, and then decide whether to use it further and in what form: paid or free. In this case, we will not share or sell user data!
We consider the important issue to be convenience in paying for the services of the system, as well as preserving anonymity while doing so. I think that the topic of work with payment systems deserves a separate article, which I will write in the near future, when all organizational aspects are settled and it will be possible to sum up.
In general, one of the main principles of our system is flexibility. We believe that the user himself knows best how it is more convenient to manage his finances, how to work with us, and our task is to give him:
Fin-ack.com is not a Web2.0 application, but it is moving towards this. In my opinion, in most cases, the creation of web services is exactly what you need to do: first, there must be a good basic system that is not worse than offline analogues. And as far as attracting users, it should develop together with them and create opportunities that are simply inaccessible to their offline competitors. This is the implementation of one of the principles of Web2.0 by Tim O'Reilly: a system that becomes better the more people use it. We have ideas on how to use the aggregated information of many users in their interests, but this is not worth talking about before they appear. I am sure that many ideas will come from users.
At the same time, we are moving further - to Web3.0 :) If you can call it a trend that the same Tim O'Reilly calls “transcend the web”, and others call it that most people will work from the web in the future applications through your mobile phone. A mobile can not "stuff" web site. Applications for it should be developed taking into account the limitations of this device, as well as the contextual possibilities it gives.
I will not talk about the specific features of our system, the article is already quite large. I hope fin-ack.com is able to tell about itself.
1. Who needs personal finance?
Many people believe that they do not keep personal accounting, because they do not have time for this or that this aspect of life is not interesting for them. For some, this is true (but only for some time). But, if you think about it, almost all city dwellers are forced in one form or another to keep records of their finances. The only question is how organized it is and what means are used for this.
By accounting, I mean not scrupulous recording of every expenditure and income, but the whole range of issues of controlling one’s financial position, budget planning, managing one’s assets and liabilities (debts, deposits, loans, etc.), analyzing expenses and incomes. Someone just keeps in mind all this - and forgets at the most critical moment. Someone writes on a piece of paper - and then spends precious time searching for it, when it suddenly becomes necessary to sort out some financial issue that took place a couple of months ago. Again, one or another account is kept by everyone, because in the modern world a lot of relationships and events are tied up for money (from work and study to one’s own home).
')
Accounting becomes necessary when a person begins to use a large number of financial products. Even a few deposits already require some kind of decision to manage themselves, and what to say when more loans, investment funds, etc. are added? He must be led by freelancers, private entrepreneurs and businessmen of any kind. Everyone can benefit from accounting because they can better understand their expenses and incomes and draw up a plan for the future. It may be possible to see those areas in which you can save, think about savings and charity. In any book, “How to Get Rich,” it is written that this is the first step towards financial independence.
Of course, many people have realized for themselves the need to keep organized records (and some people are forced to do this or other life circumstances) and are already using some means. For example, I started with plain text files. Most, of course, prefer Excel because of the financial functions built into it. Someone goes further and uses specialized programs for this: GNU Cash, MS Money, Quicken or another one of hundreds of analogues. Many of these programs are written for PDA and offer a huge advantage of being always at hand, but losing functionality ...
This approach is by far the easiest. Is it the most convenient? It all depends on the situation.
- If a person is constantly moving or, in any case, working on several computers, he has a problem of data synchronization between workstations.
- Another, perhaps even more of a headache is taking care of backups.
- Security, at first glance, seems to be in a better state compared to storing its data with 3 persons, however, you can lose your PDA or your colleagues or acquaintances can look at it with ease (while you are away somewhere), and in files someone can climb on a stationary computer too. The most annoying thing here is that someone who knows you can do it, and, in fact, only such people may be interested in learning about your finances.
- And finally, functionality. Excel is good for its flexibility, but in order to create a complete financial management system in it you need to work very well. And, in general, it is still a tool for analyzing, rather than storing data, therefore, as their volume grows, unforeseen difficulties may arise.
I think it is clear that we offer an approach to accounting for finance in the cloud, on the web. He is deprived of the above disadvantages, however, of course, has certain features. Of course, the idea is not original, including in the field of personal finance. When I became interested in this question about 2 years ago, similar systems began to appear. In the west there are probably about a dozen of them. Why do you need another one?
2. Our approach and principles on which the service is built
I repeat, everyone probably has examples of how web-based personal information storage means taking work with it to a new level. It's funny to see when colleagues from different companies that use corporate mail lose time and business opportunities due to the fact that when they are out of the office (on business trips or on sick leave) they cannot access it. In the end, all the same, you have to use G- or Y-mail. And how much money do companies have to spend to provide access to corporate mail via the web? .. For me, this killer app once became del.icio.us, which returned me the opportunity to fully and easily use bookmarks. By the way, it was del.icio.us (in its previous incarnation) that was the inspiration in the user interface design for fin-ack.
In the management of small amounts of data, a web service is, as they say, win-win Americans. And development with support is easier and cheaper, and use. Web service benefits from economies of scale. If each of the thousands of users needs to spend 10 minutes on organizing their backup data, even if it takes a developer’s day to work out a complex and reliable backup scheme, these 8 hours still do not compare with the 160 hours spent by each user individually. Also on support.
What is unique about our solution? Of course, I studied what is already there, and also (if possible) people's opinions. They say that the main problem with regard to finance is that people are too lazy to constantly enter their expenses and incomes. The 4konverta system is even based on this assumption. In America, this problem is solved in its own way: since they have 90% of the payments by cards (i.e., cashless), they take information about spending directly from banks, and each system tries to compete on who will better process this information, categorizes it, etc. (In my opinion, this is the release of effort into the wind). Yes, and you are surprised at the credulity of the Americans, who quietly give the authentication data from their account to a third party. Since there have already been scandals with identity theft from any company, starting with AOL ?! Another disadvantage of this approach is that their systems are sharpened by automatic accounting of expenses, so they often do not even have the ability to make them manually (for example, as I recall, this is how the Mint system works).
As a person who introduces his expenses / income, let me disagree with the fact that people are lazy. They are simply not comfortable . And we have several answers to this.
- First, you need to come up with a convenient workflow for yourself. For example, I am not at all interested in the fact that in my check from the supermarket there are 20 items of products. I will write them down simply as “food” and put the total amount. On average, I need to enter 3-5 records into the system per day, and it takes 3-5 minutes. During this time, I can look at my balance sheets, think about plans, do some other analysis.
- The input system interface should be convenient (it seems to be understandable, but, for some reason, it is not always done)
- You do not need to memorize your expenses - they need to be entered immediately. For this we have developed a special mobile client . Which also has some other features relevant to the device in your pocket.
The next major question is security. Many people do not want to store their financial data with third parties. This is both a rational and emotional grain. As for me, personal correspondence is more valuable than financial data (if, of course, you are not engaged in illegal operations), and it has long been migrated to the web. Again, we have several answers to this question:
- We maintain complete anonymity of users. When you register, you do not need to enter any personal data (even e-mail). The only way to identify the user that remains is the IP address - we undertake not to store in accordance with the User Agreement. (Naturally, if you use a proxy, then this possibility of identification disappears). The only thing is that we are going to use the location information accurate to the city, but this does not violate anonymity.
- Data transfer is protected by SSL. Data is stored on our server, and not by third parties.
- Well, in the end, again, it all depends on the user. If there are concerns about the purity of a transaction, or it is not necessary to bring it into the system, or you can make it in some form that is unintelligible to others.
Importantly, the confidentiality of user data protects the business model of our company. There are a lot of free services on the Internet, but in the field of personal information processing free of charge is often a bad sign. Why? It is clear that the service is not created from altruistic motives, but one way or another to make money. How? Someone may hope for chance: “here we will gather a million users and we will have a queue of buyers”. This means that it is likely that the service will not live long, and will have to look for another. Someone is counting on an advertising model, but in this area it will not work (the user is interested in spending too little time on such sites, not to mention the use of mobile clients, which generally reduce this time to almost no time). More precisely, it can earn when developers are ready to share their users' data with third parties. In short, free cheese is only in a mousetrap, and who, if not people who take into account their finances, do not understand what you have to pay for everything - the only question is whether it is worth it?
We chose a well-proven model in this area (for example, with 37signals projects) of a partially paid system. This means that those features that are truly distinctive will have a small monthly fee. At the same time, the basic accounting system can always be used for free. Moreover, invoices will be issued after 3 months after the fact , i.e. there will be an opportunity to fully try the system during this period, and then decide whether to use it further and in what form: paid or free. In this case, we will not share or sell user data!
We consider the important issue to be convenience in paying for the services of the system, as well as preserving anonymity while doing so. I think that the topic of work with payment systems deserves a separate article, which I will write in the near future, when all organizational aspects are settled and it will be possible to sum up.
In general, one of the main principles of our system is flexibility. We believe that the user himself knows best how it is more convenient to manage his finances, how to work with us, and our task is to give him:
- tools for solving their problems;
- tell how to use them;
- show examples of different approaches to their application.
Fin-ack.com is not a Web2.0 application, but it is moving towards this. In my opinion, in most cases, the creation of web services is exactly what you need to do: first, there must be a good basic system that is not worse than offline analogues. And as far as attracting users, it should develop together with them and create opportunities that are simply inaccessible to their offline competitors. This is the implementation of one of the principles of Web2.0 by Tim O'Reilly: a system that becomes better the more people use it. We have ideas on how to use the aggregated information of many users in their interests, but this is not worth talking about before they appear. I am sure that many ideas will come from users.
At the same time, we are moving further - to Web3.0 :) If you can call it a trend that the same Tim O'Reilly calls “transcend the web”, and others call it that most people will work from the web in the future applications through your mobile phone. A mobile can not "stuff" web site. Applications for it should be developed taking into account the limitations of this device, as well as the contextual possibilities it gives.
I will not talk about the specific features of our system, the article is already quite large. I hope fin-ack.com is able to tell about itself.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/47250/
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