Ask HN: Review Cash Curve, our free webapp.(cashcurveapp.com) I am working at Brighten Labs, a startup founded by a couple of my college friends. We first built CashCurve in February 2009 to be our own cash flow management tool. To me, it seems simple and effective, but we would like feedback. Thanks! |
1) The text boxes on the sign up page are massive and take up the whole line (same with the login). 2) Sign up process isn't that "smooth", how about an automatic log in instead of asking me to check my inbox? (I have my e-mail open and it made me sigh...) 3) The sign up e-mail has a massive wall of text on how to use the application. While it's good explaining, I feel that in the e-mail is the wrong place. Making it a webpage will allow you to more comfortably use bullet points and numbers and just easier to digest/find. Or perhaps an interactive thing and point to page elements? 4) You put a $ sign in amount field and I took this as an opportunity to change to £ which didn't work as expected. What about putting it as "Amount ($)" or removing it entirely. 5) Sensible default of "1" on the recurring once enabled? 6) Data entry is a problem. 7) Missed setting a transaction to "recurring every" and had to delete and re-add to set it. 8) Bug! Added a recurring transaction as 15 but set the type to expense, went to edit it and change it back to income. This only changed the first transaction and further recurring transactions were left unchanged. Clicking on the refresh button and it's now still showing all the items as expenses again. 9) You could drop the "type" entirely and get the user to enter -15 for expense and just 15 for an income! 10) Editing the recurring transactions and I hit edit and I don't realise the form above me has changed -- perhaps some sort of visual cue? Or perhaps, click the fields and they become editable? 11) No back button (browser's button uses stale data) to the page I was on before. Resorted to clicking the "Dashboard". 12) Bug! Still entering data, missed the "Amount" field and it has reset my type to "Expense". Strange that it doesn't reset the type when I miss "recurring every" value.
Sweet! I'm finished! Problem: I would quite like to have more financial projections but currently the problem is entering the data; you'd need ways to easily add it (e.g. various import functions or an API. The way I see things:
cost of adding data + cost of the app (what you would charge) < cost of doing this myself (e.g. investing time to graph the projections using my own database (saving on data entry time!))
Grouping would also be a good feature to have e.g. I would want to project transactions for separate things.
Controlling how far in the future I can see the forecase, although I realise this is probably just a proof of concept app.
Type stuff up in an Excel-sheet like format and instantly see how it affects your future cash. I'd been using an Excel version of this CashFlow till earlier this year when I made it a web-app. The web-version enabled me to plan when to quit my job, when to start my side-biz, how much to spend on shopping/luxuries once I quit my job etc. If you are disciplined, you can definitely use a CashFlow tool to manage your personal finances a lot better than just following words of advice like "give up that $5/day Starbucks habit."
The real reason a CashFlow app is better for personal finances is because your salary is not the same every month. 26 paychecks / 12 months => 10 out of 12 months you make LESS than your average monthly salary. Also expenses like auto insurance could occur once every 6 months, garbage bills could be thrice a year, and water bill once every 45 days. Like the predator cycles that Magicicada tries to avoid ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magicicada ) if all of your big bills end up hitting you in the same month / pay period, you will be short on cash even if your spending hasn't changed. Or you may spend 10% extra in that month because the prior months you didn't feel a crunch and thought maybe you're doing well financially, so next month you can award yourself the iPad 3G.
For people who don't live on a fixed salary, a CashFlow tool can still be very helpful because you just put in your best-guess estimate of your monthly/weekly earnings instead of a fixed 2-week paycheck. Even if you have ample savings and never have to worry about spending $5k here or there, you can still use a cash forecasting tool to meet your future savings/investment goals.
However, these sort of "back of the envelope" type calculations (guessing at the future) I usually do on paper or maybe excel at the most. They aren't the sort of thing I keep around or feel like I'd need a web app for. Certainly, can't imagine paying for something like this.
If it auto pulled in all my expenses/income that actually occurred this could be useful - but of course this is an accounting tool and totally different product.
I do think there is a market for a simple/useable accounting tool that auto-pulled in your stuff and made an income sheet/balance statement for you. Mint leaves a lot to be desired in this area with it's "what's left" concept and isn't applicable to business. But again, this may be way off from what you are going for.
The site mentions the tool was built for internal use at Brighten Labs. Perhaps you can elaborate how you use the tool. An article describing what exactly you put in to the software, and how you interpret the results might be helpful.
1- Can't enter one-time/recurring expense/income for past date. What happens if I'm late?
2- Currencies? Only USD? Not a big deal since I can just pretend your USD are my local currency, bus still... not elegant.
3- After entering recurring income, I couldn't edit it. There was no response when clicking on 'edit' here: https://cashcurveapp.com/recurrings. I use Chrome 5.0.375 on Windows XP.
1- Tracking income vs. expenses is difficult. Maybe color code income in green and expense in red. This becomes especially difficult when clicking on the recurring tab.
2- Optional stop date needed for recurring transactions. I can't configure a recurring expense (such as payment in installments) over the next 3 months.
3- Recurring expenses by named months. I have recurring expenses that occur each month, except during the summer (such as childrens' school tuition). I'd like to configure income/expenditure for all months of the year, except July/Aug.
4- Recurring transaction sorting. I'd like to sort by any column in desc & asc order.
5- Transaction Categorization. I'd like to group expenses/income transactions by custom categories: Utilities, Housing, Bank etc. When creating a new transaction, I can choose which category to enter it under.
Great work! I look forward to future developments.
- You have a dollar everywhere ($). it would be great if I could customize the currency.
- Adding the ability to add expense/income from the past would be great. I can see how you would make the date selector disable that as a default (because you can't travel back in time), however, when there are recent additionas etc that were in the past and you want to add them, it is nice to be able to see/browse the graph..
- The recurring income/expenses seem to go back in time, not start from the date I picked... at least everything is red and weird. I don't know if that's a bug, maybe I just don't understand.
Great work, anyways!
This is the way that I want to plan my budget, my expenses, and to see what buying an iMac today will look like to my grocery budget over the next 30 days :)
I've been wanting to mock this up myself, but I haven't, only because I didn't want to mess with the recurring profiles on the dates, and it's worthless without that.
I would say that the only thing that would make this more valuable would be if I can plug in a budget for variable expenses (Gas, Electric, Petrol) and then change that when I get/pay the bill.
There is a way you can budget for variable expenses. Simply set up a recurring transaction. On the Dashboard page, you can edit an individual instance of the recurring transaction without affecting the others. So when you actually receive your electric bill, you can put in the exact amount and date.
If you need more help, please drop me a line at https://cashcurveapp.com/help
We actually are a service provider in the sense that our income is split approximately equally between projects and recurring support/maintenance, so this can definitely help us frame cash flow in terms of our recurring revenue. I try to budget exclusively from that and not count on project revenue since it so volatile and difficult to predict.