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@datarade @juecd_ Thanks! We started with SMS too, but got feedback that people have Slack open all day at work anyway, and it's easier to get it there. Also users said they wanted to share it to a channel so other founders / finance people can see it at the same time.
The big issue with financial tracking for startups seems to be a) not being able to quickly get digests / queries about their revenues, b) not staying on top of costs -- coming from the bank account, and c) the combination of the two (revenues AND costs) in one place. Most companies seem to only look at these stats once a quarter when they have to do accounting.
Right now we're trying to figure out what else companies need regarding financial tracking so we can build it in :)
@datarade Interesting that you think SMS is a more accepted platform for interacting with start-ups — I always thought receiving SMS from companies was more for urgent information (eg servers going down) and email (now Slack). Are there specific products you think SMS is a better platform for?
@juecd_ SMS is something I can read everywhere. I'll also open it right there. (No data connectivity required.)
iOS users don't open the notification centers on their phone, they do however open SMS. (In fact, go to an iOS user and ask them to open their notifications, you'll see what I mean.)
Android users do open notifications, because it's configured differently from my understanding.
I'm an iOS user. People love SMS as an interface. As well, tell me, what's the biggest killer SlackBot company? (I don't believe there is one, because it's a 2-3 step tray.io or zapier.com integration packaged with abstraction)
Cheers.
Really neat idea! I think having Slack as a "master dashboard" for everything related to your business is a really interesting trend and I can't wait to have more apps in the ecosystem that help with a variety of business related tasks. I would love to know more about what kinds of queries you can make using Sway?
@rahulnihalani Thanks! Yeah we're aiming to make it so people don't have to disrupt their current workflow to find out information they need. You can query specific dates (either the date itself, or a human-understandable phrase like 'yesterday' or 'december 2015'), and also ranges you set ('last month through today'). The goal is to figure out what queries are most relevant and get that to people right in Slack so they don't have to open up their Stripe dashboard to go figure it out themselves
I meet a lot of startups who have a poor sense of their financial numbers...especially burn. Giving everyone on a team the ability to ask these questions should keep a lot more companies honest about whether they're being frugal and truly resourceful with what they have.
@ilikevests Thanks! Definitely agreed with the issues keeping on track of cash burn, hopefully having this information more easily can help with that.
Congrats on the launch!
Love the concept of making the day-to-day startup stats accessible to founders, with an on demand slackbot! Signing up to check it out.
Wondering where do you see it evolves from here? Would you want to be "The Slackbot that keeps you on top of your company's different stuff" or "The things stuff that keep you you on top of your company's money"?
Congrats on the launch Catherine and Ashwin! Messaging + personal financial management was awesome to see last year, I'm really curious to see it also move into more enterprise financial management. What other features are you guys planning on the roadmap?
@charleyma @shwinda Thanks so much! We're really excited about this space, especially because Slack is becoming a great medium for interacting with users.
We're working on integrations with accounting software, as well as visualizations via graphs, etc. Our vision is to help users aggregate and cut their financial data in insightful ways!
This looks very cool! I see that you integrate with Stripe which seems useful for seeing exactly where revenue is coming from at glance. Any plans to build out analytics or notifications around that?
It also might be cool to generate a weekly digest of expense/revenue data that gets delivered automatically via email or Slack.
@jenniferdewalt Thanks for your kind words! We're still exploring what would be most useful for Stripe users, but we're starting with reporting Stripe-generated revenues. Is there anything specific around Stripe you think would be useful?
Love the weekly digest idea.
@juecd_ One thing that might be useful to know is changes in revenue or subscriptions from week to week. If there is an unexpected spike or dropoff, that would be good to know along with the bare numbers.
Do you think the bot will eventually remind users to do certain financial tasks? Payroll, taxes, invoicing, etc?
@kelrabiey Definitely. We not only want to remind people to do certain tasks, but help them do it -- either automatically or through our command line interface!
Really awesome product (currently using it)! Particularly cool that it lets you query and get a quick snapshot without wasting any time.
This is super useful @charleyma @shwinda . Have really enjoyed the beta product! Congrats on the launch!!
@rafizkv Thanks Rafi, it's great having you on board. Glad you guys are getting some value from it!
Hey guys, co-maker of Sway here! Super excited to share Sway with ProductHunt today. We're a Slackbot that integrates with Stripe and banks (through plaid.com) to help start-ups manage their company's finances. We give you your company's revenues and expenses straight to your Slack channel when you type "/finances". We also support flexible querying — type a date (like '3/1/16' or 'yesterday') or date range ('1/1/16 through 3/9/16' or 'last week through today') and you'll get your financial digest for those dates.
The potential of Slack is super interesting to us, since Slack has become the defacto medium for start-ups (and starting to reach enterprises/smbs). It's the one app tons of different companies have open every day. By integrating into a Slack channel instead of being an app/web app, you won't have to switch contexts to get information you need when making decisions.
Happy to answer any questions and would love any feedback. Cheers!
@juecd_ Hi all, I'm the other maker of Sway -- echoing what Catherine said, we'd love any feedback and questions. Thanks so much!
Hi Ashwin and Catherine, thanks for working on the great product. Can you please show me how to set the dollar into this format $0.00? At the moment, my balance shows the rounded up numbers only which are incorrect.
This looks very cool and incredibly useful for a quick look into your businesses finances. Definitely gonna try it out.
The app is working great for my team so far, thank you! We'd really like to see future iterations with charts / data analysis integrated. A lot of financial software like Quickbooks feels too "static" and I like being able to query my financial information, feels much more "developer-y" to us!
I love the idea of a slackbot, but isn't it a bit limited compared to a website? Can I only read in reports / digests?
@jacqueline_jung Thanks Jacqueline! Right now we just have read access to things (get digests, querying) but we eventually want to let people actually perform tasks straight from Slack. E.g. in addition to just querying their Stripe to see what revenues they had over a time period, you can actually flag transactions, respond to a refund, etc straight from Slack.
@jacqueline_jung We're starting with reporting data, since that can hopefully *complement* users' existing workflows. We plan to do more in the future!
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