Scred, a house hold Finnish startup who we have used to seeing tracking debts and shared expenses is now shifting their focus towards more comprehensively managing money.
They start with managing money for different groups such as bands, indie film crews, event organisers and associations. The point is to offer a solution for communities which often don’t have good online financial applications and don’t know about accounting.
Along with the new focus the guy have also redesigned the site. Kudos to the team for learning the design tools as they went along. As Kristoffer from Scred told me “We ended up learning how to do design ourselves as we couldn’t find anyone sufficiently skilled and available to work with our bootstrapped approach”. Whether that was a good choice, I left to the user to decide herself.
The team at Scred also completely rewrote the accounting core, based on the feedback and experience of the old service. The service has now fully integrated with the new PayPal X API — and is one of the first companies to do so. The new Scred allows groups to send out invoices, track and pay expense claims, sell items with an integrated shop, collect registration fees and send payments. The key here is that all the payments are accounted automatically, depending on what activity was involved. Scred can thus automatically generate profit, loss and revenue calculations, as well as get reports on all aspects of the group’s finance. It’s almost like …well, a bank, where you don’t just transfer money (numbers moving from one database to another), but you actually add context with attachments, what it was for, who was involved, what was ordered, where it took place etc.
Scred will be taking a small transaction fee for money moved.
What do I think? I think they are on their way to making the Mint (or Balancion) for small businesses. There are few things in life as boring and as off-putting as doing accounting, yet most of the people running a company need to deal with that in some form. If Scred can enable a firm to manage all its accounting online in one location with a one click submission to the accountant to review the accounts, I think they are onto something. Secondly, small and medium sized businesses are a significantly bigger market than bands or hobby groups, and since Scred’s business is based on transaction fee this means Scred could be a bigger business too.
Scred is also taking part in the PayPal X Developer Challenge with around 50 other companies. You can check out their new focus on video below.
Scred PayPal X Developer Challenge from Scred Ltd on Vimeo.
