Why does Beancount.me exist?

Beancount.me exists to save time.

I used to work as an IT consultant in a successful financial software company. Part of my job was to go to a client and help them with their IT infrastructure and show them the technical ins and outs of our product. I found out that they were charging customers a flat rate of over €2000 per day for onsite visits by consultants.

2k-a-day

As a young guy starting out in the industry I was shocked that I could be worth 2k-a-day. The truth is that I didn't understand the business and as a as an arrogant young graduate I assumed they were paying for me and I let it go to my head. I spent a little time thinking "they don't pay me 2k a day"! But I didn't have time to complain because after every trip I had enter my expenses.

Time wasted on expenses

I worked out that for every day I spent out of the office I was spending a quarter of a day just organising my file of receipts and entering data into the expense system. It might reflect badly on me but another waste of time was that I was maintaining a running list of things that were wasting my time...

Legacy software, enterprise systems, form filling, oh my!

• Legacy software: Why can't we use AI to do this for us (hint: we can and Beancount.me does). The first expenses portal I used as a professional was an MSDOS window. Some companies still require Internet Explorer 7 for their expenses platform.
• Categories: does "Coffee" go under "Food/Lunch" or "Food/Dinner" and if you take the subway is that "Taxi" or "Airline ticket". Why can't this be free form?
• Enterprise systems are a pain: I worked in a bank with an Enterprise bloatware that claimed to handle all accounting needs. It took me three months just to get a user on the system because of the "on-boarding process" which involved a security check. Consultants and independents really need a system that's dynamic.
• Forms: Filling in forms is just slow. It seems counter-intuitive for especially built forms but if you've ever had to enter expenses into a form you'll know that it's tedious and error prone.
• People: You make mistakes and you have to work with other people. It's quite common to spend 15 hours entering information only to get a response along the lines of "can you send me a the receipt for 80 cents from August from last year". The receipt is the data and so it should be easy to share the source (another hint: it is with Beancount.me).

You're losing time and money

Now that I knew I was worth 2k-a-day, every time I came back from a trip I asked anybody who'd listen "why am I spending so much time doing data entry?". My boss told me that I should shut up and finish my expenses form and let slip that they'd really like me to work on something billable because they were charging the client €1500 for my off-site work.

The company was losing up to 20% of potential revenue due to me as an employee because we weren't making use of technology. We were a team of technology experts that were reading numbers of little bit of paper and typing them into a mainframe. Instinctively everybody can see that there's a better way.

Data Entry - Can't somebody else do it?

ME: "I'm Mr. 2k-a-day, why am I wasting time on expenses? Can't somebody less valuable enter the data from these receipts?".
MY BOSS: "I see what you mean. Go and talk to accounting and see what you come up with."
(stomp to accounting)
ME: "Can you deal with this manual data entry for me? You see I'm worth 2k-a-day".
ACCOUNTING (internally): "If you don't do it then we'll have to. Frankly, to avoid spending hours and hours reading your crumpled up receipts is worth more to me than any saving for the company"
ACCOUNTING (to me): "That's the way everybody does it and you're the only one complaining. So hurry up and get your expenses in because we've introduced a deadline"

Beancount.me to the rescue

At Beancount.me we want to make life easy. You shouldn't have to carry around a little black folder of receipts like a Victorian book keeper. Record your receipts as you go and keep them in the cloud.

Deep learning

Beancount.me takes advantage of vision empowered by the most advanced deep learning systems. It will read your receipt and extract the data so that you don't have to.

Make your data useful

The beancount.me interface allows you to view, search and report on expenses in the system. Data can be exported to PDF or to a spreadsheet such as Excel, Google Sheets or Libreoffice. You can use your data how you wish and there's no need to trapped by what an enterprise accounting system allows.

Find that receipt before the warranty runs out

Beancount.me is powered with fuzzy search so that you never have to worry about losing your data. Do you need to find the receipt for that printer you bought 11 months ago? Simply log into our web interface and you

Hand written receipts

Are you tired of reading data written by hand. You don't have to because Beancount.me will do it for you. If the system can't read it then it probably can't be read.

The competition

The hurdle with a new service like Beancount.me is the perceived competition. There's lots of companies in the expenses field and so why do we need beancount.me?

Enterprise solutions

There's plenty of bloatware on the market that wants to solve the same problem. Usually, these enterprise software solutions do too much. Why should you pay for a software to file your taxes and handle your payroll when what you need is a way to keep the proof of purchase for your games console safe.

Beancount.me does one thing but it does it well. It will integrate with any system because you can access and export all of your data easily as plain text.

Credit card add-ons

Most of the competitors advertising a solution are actually credit card companies packaged with some data storage for you to upload an image.

The typical approach is

• Make a purchase with your service issued credit card.
• Take a picture of the receipt and it will be saved in your online card account and be linked to that card payment

This solution is acceptable but you'll get charged twice because on top of your monthly subscription you'll eventually be hit with a repayment at a very high interest rate.

Medium to large companies might be attracted to this because they can access the data similar to most enterprise solutions and they're already on top of their financing and repayments.

Usually, these services don't even bother to scrape the data from the receipt.

So beware that you won't have easy access to your data because it will be on your credit card statement. This type of service is not really about data. It will be useful in the case of an audit but your data is not necessarily yours. You might quickly find yourself locked in to monthly subscriptions if you want to keep those old receipts.

Beancount.me makes your data available to you and won't try to upsell you a high interest credit card and it won't resell your data.

The little guys

There are a small handful of companies offering a solution that will read data off your receipts and doesn't require you to take out a credit card or give access to your bank accounts.

Beancount.me and these little guys are heroes to the rescue to the small business and independent consultant. We're perfect for anyone who needs to file their taxes or even people who want to keep on top of their medical expenses.

At the minute we're happy that we're the best and we recommend that you try out these services so that you can see for yourself. Save yourself time, effort and expensive accounting fees by creating an account.