Running your own small business has plenty of perks: you can set your own hours, work from home, and there’s nary a TPS report in sight. But there are also a number of downsides, not the least of which is the fact that you have to take on role of your business’s accountant. That means keeping tabs on business expenses, filing taxes four times a year, and plenty of other headaches. Cue Outright.com, a startup launching out of beta today that looks to be the “absolute simplest” online application for small business back office tracking, accounting, bookkeeping, and more.
Getting started with the site is quite easy, because Outright has recently partnered with a number of financial services: you can import invoices from Freshbooks, receipts from Shoeboxed, your PayPal transaction history, as well as your credit card transactions through a deal with Expensify, which supports 94% of US credit cards. You only have to do this once — once you’ve linked your account, they’ll keep automatically updating until you unlink them.
Once you’re done with the initial setup, everything on Outright is fairly self-explanatory (which is sort of the idea). The home screen presents you with a chart pitting your costs against your income to give you an at-a-glance look at your business’s health. At the top of the screen you’ll see tabs for Income, Expenses, Taxes, and Reports, where you can hone in on the transactions you’re looking for. Transactions are automatically sorted into different categories (for example, the site knows that your airline’s tickets belong under the ‘Travel’ category), and you can also generate reports on a per-customer basis, which would be helpful for eBay sellers. Beyond that the application helps with taxes by offering reminders when a deadline is coming up and an estimated amount that you’ll have to pay.
Outright isn’t as robust as some other financial services out there, but if you’re looking to keep things simple it’s certainly worth a look. The company was formerly called GoBoostrap.com, but changed its name in conjunction with news of its $2 million funding in February.
WOW! Saas for small businesses. Things every Start up needs.
wow, that’s what we need and not huge #sage platforms
I was looking over this and was mildly envious. I have an overly complex Saas system for my small business, and I would kill to have better integration and interfaces like Outright.
Very cool, love the sound of the easy import of data from other platforms.
Accounting software is a tricky space to dominate the world in. All these little nations outside the US with their own whacky accounting laws and standards need catering to. But you can always sell out to Intuit
In .AU/.NZ we have Saasu and Xero, luckily. They’re both great products with easy user experiences along similar lines to Outright, but with some higher-end features for larger businesses too.
Mint.com on a different scale, it seems.
These services look promising. My business is held back by one primary factor: Our accountant uses QuickBooks, and he handles our corporate taxes. So if we want to share data with him directly, we are forced to use QuickBooks – which we absolutely hate, of course.
Second, we use Authorize.NET as our backend CC processor. Would love to see one of these services partner with them to provide automatic transaction data sharing/integration.
Perhaps in the not so distant future?
This is exactly the case I’m in. All of the accountants I speak with seem to be tethered to QuickBooks. I had a little hope when I heard of Quickbooks Online thinking they may have re-invented the interface a little, however it’s basically a carbon copy of QB.
An “Export to QuickBooks” format would have me switching over to Outright today!
we use http://www.quic...booksonline.com and have no problems – i much prefer it to the desktop version.
it may because i’m from the A but everytime I see their company name I think “gay?”.
For those who may have been looking for the new features last night, we actually released first thing this morning. Everything is now live.
Feel free to jump in and get your business finances under control. And please send us feedback and suggestions – support at outright.
So much more intuitive than the clunky QuickBooks, Peachtree, and other old-skool programs. It’s great to see a company using technology (and the web) to make business accounting easy… and these guys are doing a great job!
Why cannot I add and import bank account? I have many expense (payment) were sent from my bank account. Does this mean I am out of lucky to manage my expense paid through bank account?
Also, another bad thing is that the system can only import last 30 days records.
But I really like the application though. Very impressive and useful.
Congrats to the Outright team and look forward to seeing another online small business software success story.
They’ve made a great, simple to use service that goes where other accounting products dare to tread!
For readers who haven’t heard, there are several simple SaaS bookkeeping solutions available right now – each with different strengths. It can be a huge relief to small businesses to have a Web-based system that’s cost effective and easy-to-use. Congrats to Outright on its announcement today, showing the viability of this market and offering a nice new option for PayPal users.
Daniel, we’ll make note of the bank account request. It’s already on our radar. Also, you are able to download more than 30 days worth of data for most sources. Ebay only allows 90 days worth of data at the moment but our other sources should provide data for the whole year. Email us at support if you have specific questions about your account.