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Sway Finance — Automated accounting for SaaS companies
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Replies
@katmanalac This is awesome! CPAs in our network deal with SaaS companies and they constantly face the issue of unorganized books. Most startups flat out ignore this subject, but good bookkeeping is the foundation of any successful business. It is crucial to organize and streamline your daily/weekly/monthly tasks right from the very beginning. I have been training CPAs how to use Zapier to streamline many tasks and avoid manual labor --- would love to see how Sway can help businesses stay organized and provide our CPAs the accurate data they need for taxes, budgeting, financial analysis, etc.
@katmanalac Thanks Kat! We agree -- we can't wait to help SaaS business owners take the stress of bookkeeping off their shoulders.
@nodarj Great to hear! Yes we've found that Sway is also great complement for bookkeepers to automate away some of the more menial tasks (splitting up Stripe transfers, salaries, etc.) so they can focus on higher-level advisory services. CountUp looks great, we'll definitely take a look.
@katmanalac This is a huge step towards accounting automation as I don't think revenue recognition has been done before.
@s2mmy2 @katmanalac We absolutely agree! Proper rev rec gets even more unwieldy with so many different users on different plans (annual vs. monthly, etc). Automation takes the guesswork out of a lot of that.
Two questions:
1. We use inDinero. How would you differ?
2. What are the SaaS-specific features? Does Sway support companies that do not have a standard subscription-based revenue model?
@palavalli Thanks for the questions!
Regarding SaaS, we're most different in terms of proper revenue recognition (a big issue for SaaS companies with staggered payment plans). Since we tap directly into Stripe/Paypal we can have customer-specific data so we can recognize their revenue properly. Also we're planning to offer some real-time metrics in the near future (MRR, most profitable customers, etc) so having the real-time payment data that SaaS companies use makes that part a lot easier!
We're just focused on the bookkeeping aspect right now, whereas inDinero focuses on the entire back office (tax, controller, etc); our service is mainly self-serve and for companies without complicated financials. We're expanding into non-subscription companies soon but right now SaaS companies offer us the best path to automate their books!
@charleyma Thanks Charley couldn't have done it without you guys :) keep up the great work!
Sway is super helpful in keeping track of all the moving pieces across different platforms. Congrats on the launch!
Love the product! And we, at UpKeep, are one happy customer! Takes the pain out of book keeping and puts it into the hands of the experts at Sway
Hi all! One of the makers of Sway here.
We launched earlier this year as a Slackbot that helps companies' gain a better understanding of their finances, and we're excited to launch our newest product, which is a bookkeeping service made specifically for SaaS companies. We got the idea when we realized that when it comes to a company's finances, one set of inputs (bank transactions, payment processors) can have a TON of outputs: taxes, accounting, financial reports, underwriting loans, etc. We had started with "reporting" as our output, but we decided we want to do more for our users.
We plug into companies' existing financial systems — Stripe, Paypal, Quickbooks Online — and handle all the bookkeeping so companies have tax ready financials in real-time ... necessary to understand financial health and especially necessary come tax time. Our original Slackbot plugs in with those same systems and provides financial reports.
We've also built our own machine learning model that categorizes transactions for us (we like to say that "regex doesn't scale" :)). Categorization of transactions feels like a natural use for supervised learning, but we're exploring where else machine learning might play a role.
We'd love to answer any questions you have!
@juecd_ With the new App Store changes for Subscriptions, any plans to offer an integration with iTunes Connect or AppFigures?
@imakestrides @juecd_ iTunes connect is definitely on the horizon for release before the changes take effect this fall. Especially with the dual-revenue-percentage model (85% vs. 70%) it's going to be even more important to tie in sales with customer data to properly structure the company's financials.
We're also catherine@swayfinance.com and ashwin@swayfinance.com if you have a more specific question!
@alexandrw @juecd_ Thanks! Looks like Scale had a great launch too, can't wait to see what you guys have planned
Great to see this. I do this rec rec manually; from my research there is a huge hole for automated revenue recognition at a reasonable price point. My two "off-system" reconciliations that I do are rev recogntion and credit card expense managment -- if Sway can solve these two, it should be a no brainer even for folks with an accounting background.
I poked around the website -- do you have any write-ups/landing pages on how you set up rev recognition rules?
@wanderslth Thanks Ken! We don't yet but that's a great idea — we're also starting to get good ideas for a blog post :)
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