I appreciate you expressing your thoughts. Let me try to address them for you.
inDinero shook up our whole business model at the beginning of 2012, pivoting from a self-service model to a full-service model. As a result, we’ve been dedicating the vast majority of our resources to our full-service clients.
This has impacted response times for our self-service clients, but we see that as a necessary compromise in the growth of our company. I’m glad you decided to upgrade to our full-service package!
It looks like we could have done a better job on our calls with you today in describing our payroll offerings. Yes, it’s absolutely true that we use Intuit as the backbone of our payroll service. We think at this stage of inDinero’s growth that we need to invest our resources in developing our web-based dashboard and providing the suite of bookkeeping and tax services that our clients require. Using Intuit as a payroll backbone allows us to keep our focus where it needs to be.
While many of our payroll clients have their pay days on the 1st and 16th of the month, we can support any pay dates and periods you would like to use. I’m sorry if this was not made clear.
We do use Google Docs with some clients to share information because many of our clients find that a convenient medium, but we do not use it for sensitive information exchange. Generally we use it only for the reporting of hours for hourly employees and reimbursement amounts.
I hope I’ve addressed your concerns, and your Finance Team at inDinero is still very eager to work with you and show you how we can make your life easier. We look forward to proving that to you.
It's not really "self-service" when I'm paying $50/month for the service. If it's broken it needs to get fixed. Forgive me if you've made it free and I haven't noticed.
My concerns are the same. 5-6 days of lead-time required for a submitting Payroll seems a bit archaic. Sure I could do it, and yes I probably should be that organized, but things are supposed to be getting more flexible, not less flexible. If for whatever reason the person in charge of payroll ends up a couple days behind, so does your payroll, which leads to very unhappy employees very quickly. As I mentioned before, ADP can handle payroll in 24 hours, and I feel like they're a dinosaur of a company, you can still only use their web-portal in IE.
I understand all about focus, and if you feel relying on Intuit is the right decision, then that's fine, but that certainly makes me feel a bit uneasy knowing that a major part of your service offerings are built and rely those of another company. Especially since that company may have a conflict of interest in the future.
The pay dates and periods were a minor issue, it's really the lead-time for submitting payroll the bugs me.
My concerns are the same about Google docs and I consider hour logs and payroll crucial data. It's just too easy to make a mistake storing this information in a spreadsheet.
We do rely heavily on freshbooks for our billing and I'd love to see you integrate into freshbooks time tracking for payroll.
This is a pretty good program. I went through this back in the summer of 2009 and there were no strings attached. The Lightspeed partners were fun to work with, and we got to meet a lot of other super smart founders.
San Francisco, CA | inDinero (S10) seeks Lead Developer (indinero.com)
inDinero has been hauling for about two years now, growing to over a thousand paying business customers, and we're looking for a lead developer! Both founders (Andy and Jessica) studied computer science before starting the company, and they wrote most of the initial code until product launch. Today, the company has five full-time developers scattered across the globe, and we're looking for a tech lead who can oversee our team and it's growth as we go from five to thirty.
What will happen day-to-day?
Spec out new product features with our design team /// Improve our engineering workflow /// Get feedback from team on how we can speed up their work /// Make sure the test suite runs faster and is continuously running /// See that all devs get their technical questions answered promptly /// Update the dummy databases that our developers test code on.
Prioritize long-term structural improvements to make to our infrastructure /// Upgrading Rails /// Using something like mongo to track events /// Make sure the servers will scale /// Ensure high security /// Audit code base every quarter /// Refactor and modularize key parts of our code base.
Skills we're looking for:
Ruby on Rails, 1+ years
Java, 2+ years
HTML/CSS/Javascript
Sysadmin experience (Debian)
Interested? Shoot a note over to jobs@indinero.com with why you'd be perfect for the role!
Auto-generating a tax return is one thing. Taking advantage of all your potential tax benefits and considering your edge cases is another thing. I've seen tax returns for many of inDinero's customers, and it's clear to me that their previous accountants took shortcuts in compiling the return.
Yes, it'll get filed. But there were probably more tax advantageous things they could have / should have done. Consider these examples:
1 - tax credits. How is the government supposed to automatically know that you're paying for child care? How are they to know that you just installed solar panels on your roof or that you just purchased an electric vehicle? Sure, they can make this "automatic" -- but then you'd still be going out of your way to report your purchase, and this is in no way simpler than the current solution today.
2 - does it make sense to be taxed as a partnership or sole-proprietor? For a lot of our customers, they're basically flushing $20k down the toilet because they didn't want to go through the tiny nuisance of filing as an S-Corporation. Pretty sure you don't want the IRS to dictate your tax treatment.
3 - should you depreciate your Aeron chairs over multiple years, or do accelerated depreciation which will allow you to deduct the entire amount in a single year? The IRS gives us the flexibility to choose, and it's questions like these that may require the help of a tax professional.
4 - deducting vehicle expenses. How is the IRS supposed to figure out how many miles on your car were used for business VS personal purposes?
5 - what part of your apartment was used exclusively for hacking? No way for the IRS to know that the number is 250/1500 square feet.
In short, putting together a tax return isn't that hard. The difficult part is hunting down all of this other information that we have no way of just knowing.
Instead of asking why robots couldn't be doing our taxes by now, we might rephrase the question to read "how can we do year-round accounting in such a way that taxes are 10X easier to take care of?"
Based on my chats with other founders, I think the seed financing market is still pretty strong. Companies that should get funded are still getting funded, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I wouldn't get too worked up on the scary headline...
In reply to another comment I saw, this applies even to non-YC companies.
It's difficult to build a useful service where people have to manually enter their data. We used to make it easier for people to enter in details without having to add their bank account, but we found that they were far less likely to come back after 30 days. I'll definitely sharpen this sign up flow and try to make it more compelling to add data without knowing much more about the service.
happy to offer my 2 cents, but inDinero hasn't been PR crazy for almost a year. My email address is in my HN profile.
We've been keeping quiet, trying to get more of our core basics right. Among all the mistakes I made, I'd say getting PR too early was one of them. And not having a plan to stay relevant after an initial PR blast was my next mistake.
i noticed you guys have been quiet. thinking back to an interview where you suggested specific roadmap items that were driven by PR opportunities. congrats on the recent product developments
