Anyways, almost two months ago, when we first launched, a bunch of you emailed us, saying, “Hey why don’t you integrate with FreshBooks” and “Man, I really wish you had a way for me to download my invoices from FreshBooks”, and stuff. In fact, dozens of you were asking for FreshBooks integration, something we hadn’t expected we’d be doing until months down the line. But you changed our minds, so we did that a while ago, and now it’s nice and pretty and working.

You can go to your accounts page and add a FreshBooks account, and then we’ll download all your invoices and put them in our site for you, under the invoices tab (we don’t download your expenses yet). You can view them from your dashboard too, where we’ll total them up and let you know how much money is owed to you.

But enough text, time for screenshots!

First up: what it’ll look like on your accounts page

Followed by: what your dashboard will tell you

As well as: What your invoices tab will look like

And that’s what we’ve got so far!

Questions, comments, suggestions and feedback can be directed to freshbooks@indinero.com . Especially suggestions — is there anything you want us to do with these invoices now that we’ve got them and are showing them to you? We’re working on a bunch of other stuff right now, but if a bunch of you suggest something, we’ll try to put it on our huuuuuuge list of things we’re planning to release in the future.

When the iPad was released back in April, we made some intentional design changes to accommodate future iPad users.  We decided to drop Adobe Flash from the application completely, in favor of html5/canvas.   For example, if you’re a frequent user of our Trends functionality, you’ll notice that we have a lot of interactive graphs, and that none of them are in flash.  But up until the iPad was released, we had been using homegrown Adobe Flash charts.  In any case, they’re all gone now.

I’m confident that over the 18 months or so, other financial apps on the internet will migrate away from Adobe Flash, if only to appeal to passionate iPad users.  The only problem is that so many popular finance sites (Google Finance, Yahoo Stocks, Mint.com) have interactive graphs that are powered by homegrown Flash code — and if you’ve invested years into developing on that platform, it’s hard to just throw it away.  At inDinero, we were  originally reluctant to throw away months worth of engineering time, but we found it pretty easy to migrate everything over to existing javascript libraries that worked equally as well.

Props to our friends at Freshbooks for having an iPad compatible product too.  Keep on the lookout for the inDinero+Freshbooks integration

Jessica Mah (ceo@indinero.com)
Founder/CEO, inDinero.com

1) Freshbooks Integration. We’ve received dozens of requests to integrate with Freshbooks, so we decided to give it a go. You’ll be able to import and track all of your invoices from inDinero, and we’ll use that data to even forecast your future cashflow. Any ideas or suggestions for how we should build it? Please send me an email to let me know!

2) Forecasting. Businesses have to plan their future somehow, and lots of big questions frequently come up: how much cash will we have if we spend money on hiring someone? Or… what does our income look like if we get X new customers in Y month? And not only that, but inDinero will automatically predict the future of your finances based on the past. This great technology will also be available in the coming few weeks.

(early preview of inDinero’s Forecasting functionality.  ETA early August)

3, 4, 5…) Iterating on the existing product, and giving you a better user experience. We want to make inDinero as easy-to-use as possible, so please continue to send your requests our way. Over the past few days, we’ve received literally hundreds of emails asking us to add various features, and we read every single one of them.

Big thanks from team inDinero for the great launch. Big shoutout and thank you to our friends at TechCrunch, Venturebeat, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, WebWorkerDaily, and the other great blogs that helped us celebrate our first official day in the wild.

Jessica Mah (ceo@indinero.com)
Founder/CEO, inDinero.com

In short, we’ve done a lot.  Lets take a closer look at each of these updates.

1) Streamlined Dashboard.  A crystal-clear way to see how your business is doing.  Compare this to your ordinary banking homepage, where all you know is your bank account balance.

2) Intuitive Trends – a lot of business owners (including myself) would have no clue how much money is actually spent month to month.  Since starting inDinero, I’d be clueless of how much we spend on a month-to-month basis unless I looked at our own charts.  In this new release, we also let you see your cash balance over time.

3) Easier than ever to add your financial accounts.  As of today, we support thousands of bank/credit card institutions, not to mention credit unions and PayPal.  We think there’s no better way to manage your finances than just have it managed for you.  And our hundreds of beta-users would agree.

4, 5, 6, etc… ) Custom Categories, filtering transactions by amount/date/category, and improved alerts.  inDinero is simply more intelligent now.  It monitors your money as soon as its in the system (we run automatic updates on it every 24 hours), and we send alerts or notifications when we see excessive spending or that a big deposit cleared in your account.  One of our biggest compliments came from a user who said that the emails make it so that she doesn’t have to scan through her bank account anymore – inDinero brings all this crucial information to her by email, and aggregates all of it in a single place.

Updated Pricing Plans:  We know that a lot of our users were just starting up new businesses, and the burden of having to pay up-front was too much.  So we’ve introduced a free plan that allows any new business with up to 50 transactions the ability to use all inDinero features, free.   Established businesses with more than 50 transactions can use inDinero for only $29.95/month.  So if you’re a new entrepreneur who’s just getting started, don’t hesitate to try the free account.  Check out our plans here.

What’s next for inDinero: In the coming few weeks, we’re going to flesh out these new features some more and begin to forecast your finances.  Based on your past financial data, and public industry data, we’ll help you plan and predict where your business is headed.  If you’re interested in being an early user of this, send me an email:  jessicamah [at] indinero.com, and we’ll add you to the alpha list.

And of course, we’re continuously improving the product based on what you tell us.  So don’t hesitate to email me personally.  Stay tuned!

Jessica Mah

Founder/CEO, inDinero.com

inDinero is a relatively new company – we’ve been a corporation for a little over a year, we’ve been fulltime for only a few weeks, yet we’ve put a lot of thought into what we stand for as a company. Since deciding to work on the startup as our fulltime jobs, a lot of people have suggested we shoot for early acquisitions, suggest that we build out the ultimate Quickbooks replacement, without putting much thought into what we wanted to do with the company.

I actually found it pretty shocking that friends and classmates would suggest flipping the company as quickly as possible for a few million dollars, and they would find it shocking that a quick flip wasn’t something that interested us.  It’s because Andy and I have put a lot of thought into why we’re doing inDinero and what we stand for.  We know precisely why we’re building our company, and every decision we make is aligned with the key motivator for why we’re working on inDinero: because we want to have fun.

Sounds pretty cheesy, but if you think about it, what keeps you going during times good and bad?  The common answer is “the prospect of finding success”.  Or unfiltered, “the prospect of becoming a millionaire.”  The problem with that type of thinking is that during gloomy times, you might consider a quick pivot into a completely different business idea.  Or some friends I know would just leave entrepreneurship and go into a banking job that’s guaranteed to make them rich.  But among everyone working here at inDinero (all four of us), we’re purely in it for the fun and joy of building a great product.  And as long as all of our big “strategical decisions” are aligned with the purpose of optimizing for fun, we know we can’t fail.

People frequently ask me why I’d want to go into the accounting space.  Quick answer is that we’re not – we’ll always stop short of doing formal accounting, simply because I don’t think it’s fun.  And we won’t build comprehensive tax-management features either, because I don’t think it’s fun.  If the company doesn’t make as much money as a result, it’s ok, because we’re fulfilling our core purpose as a company:  and that’s to have fun.

I probably feel more insane about my company than most entrepreneurs – in fact, I know that I’m 99% more fanatical about inDinero for reasons I’m having trouble describing.  I had the stark realization that as long as I continue to build inDinero, I know that everyone in the company is going to have fun, which by obvious logic means that we’ll obviously be a successful company.  And the true beauty behind that statement is that we’ve already achieved great success by merely having fun.  So in order to be successful, we just need to stay in business.  Continue what we’ve been doing for the past three weeks, but manage to continue this trajectory for the next 60 or 70 years of our lives.  This statement holds true for everyone in the company right now.

Having massive amounts of fun while building a company also needs to be rationalized.  What comprises fun?  1) People, 2) Product, 3) Vision.  Having fun while building product is relatively easy – just don’t build features that you find useless, and don’t build complex accounting features just because people want them.  Frequently, there are simpler ways to solve the same problem.  I’ll describe “vision” further in a future blog post, but I don’t think that’s immediately important for having fun in an early-stage startup.  Which leaves “people” as the most important factor to consider.

Among my entrepreneurial classmates at Berkeley and friends in the YCombinator program, I’ve found that a lot of them have trouble recruiting talent.  Finding technical expertise is often considered the most difficult part, with less consideration being placed on culture fit.  With inDinero, we quickly brought on two early members – Chris and Borden.  The main reason for bringing on more coders so early in the life of the company was primarily because we didn’t know how long it’d be before we could find other incredible computer scientists who we would consider family.  Consider this thought:  you met the woman of your dreams, and she wants to get married soon.  If you don’t propose now, she’s definitely going to leave you.  Even if you’re not entirely ready to get married, it makes obvious sense that you should marry her.  Andy and I made a similar decision for bringing on Chris and Borden – simply put, we wanted them to be family, and if we didn’t do it now, we probably never would.

inDinero is actually like a family.  We cook and clean for each other, treat each other like playful siblings, work as hard as you’d expect from a group of asian immigrants, and it works out incredibly well.  The interesting thing is that many software companies have cultures equally as unique. I’ve seen other early startups with cultures that resembles that of a fraternity, class project team, united nations delegation, or for the unfortunate business-people-only teams, a fortune-500 company.  All startups pride themselves on having a “hip” culture, but the interpersonal dynamics are vastly different from startup to startup.  Some people say that your culture is solidified from the first people you hire, but from personal observation, it’s usually based on the relationship between the original cofounders.  For example, my co-founder Andy is practically family to me, and therefore, our company has been shaped around the idea of being a very cohesive family.

While I run the risk of one day contradicting myself, I think it’s important to give some tangible examples of what this means going forward:  Anyone we involve in the company will feel like family.  This includes employees, and even investors and board members.  If I wouldn’t adopt them into my family (and if the rest of my family doesn’t want to adopt them), it’s a no go.  And this is consistent with our company’s purpose of existence, because we’ll continue to have massive amounts of fun as long as there’s nobody here to crash the party.  Based on these thoughts, we’ve been able to narrow our hiring process down to a single question:  do we trust them enough to adopt them into our family?

Is it too early for a technically three-week-old startup to be thinking about these kinds of things?  Perhaps, but it didn’t take us long to come to the conclusion that we were in this for the fun.  And it won’t take others to realize that they’re in it for the money, the excitement, escape, or challenge.  As your company grows, continue to be mindful of the original reasons for why you decided to go into business.  That way, you’ll somehow find certain success.

We didn’t stop there.  A lot of our users asked for a better breakdown of their spending – to see how much they were spending on food, on rent, on gas, so we quickly added spending by category.

When we were first building out inDinero, accountants told us they wanted us to build “Profit and Loss Statements”, but it ended up that most entrepreneurs don’t give much attention to those long reports. So we decided to make the entrepreneurs happy by giving them intuitive graphs, while also appealing to those with accounting knowledge by creating what’s possibly the easiest-to-understand profit and loss statement in the marketplace today.

And even here, we’re looking to improve our trending abilities. On the roadmap include the breakdown of income, ability to see trends by a specific date range, among other things our users ask for.

Have some ideas for us? Send me an email – jessicamah@indinero.com.

Thanks for the incredible support you’ve given us over the past year – we’re finally working on inDinero fulltime as of today, and there are a lot of great things we’d like to share:

- We now have a team of four people.  Andy and I are being joined by two other ex-Berkeley computer scientists, Borden and Chris.  The four of us moved into a new house/office next to downtown Mountain View in California.

- Our summer 2010 release will be out this weekend.  Among the updates include a streamlined dashboard, new+improved trends, and account alerts.  An official announcement on this will be posted soon.

- What’s in store for the rest of the summer? A lot – we’re keeping busy with better ways to import your financial data, far more comprehensive trends, and more intelligent analysis on your data.  If you have any more ideas on what you’d like to see from us over the next few weeks, send me an email at jessicamah@indinero.com.  :)

And that’s just the start.  We’ve been able to build out inDinero for 12 months while juggling other full-time commitments, and we’re ready to turn inDinero into the best tool that all small businesses and startups use to monitor their finances.

Jessica Mah

There’s been a lot of brainstorming going on and now we have something big cooking in the Indinero office. It’s going to require all-hands-on-deck effort, which means we will put our horror series and small biz article posts on hold.

But you won’t regret the wait once you see what we’ve been up to.

Paul Graham’s “What Startups Are Really Like”

Branding & The Power of Telling A Story

Entrepreneur.com’s “7 Tips to Score VC Cash”

How to Pitch the Unsellable

Got any small business blogs we should promote next week? What about small biz tweeters?

In a nutshell, a good friend of mine slowly developed his company for years while working. He simply was too afraid of not being able to financially support himself working on the venture full-time (if he had Indinero back then, he would know exactly how much he had and wouldn’t have to worry! . The moment he eventually did work full-time, a competitor had emerged and captured a large majority of the market because they were entirely committed to their growth.

A good moral of this story could be to either go big or go home, but perhaps the strategy of ensuring financial stability and moving slowly may work in the long run. It’s all a matter of opinion. Ultimately, it’s important to know your cash and still innovate quickly!

(Oops! This was supposed to post yesterday, never trust Wordpress’ scheduling feature to itself!)