Sway Finance (YC S16) Automates Accounting for SaaS Companies

Big fan of what you all are doing!

This looks great, and automated revenue recognition straight into Quickbooks is a great feature. Do you have a Braintree integration yet, or soon? The integration section suggests not quite yet...

I spent the morning complaining at my business partner about how nobody seems to be solving the transaction classification issue. Every site (xero, ynab, pocketsmith etc) seem to think its ok to push all the grunt work off to their customers. I actually spent a couple of hours in the weekend hacking together a script to handle smarter bank transaction classification for me. This couldn't be more timely - will take look and have a play!

Edit to add: also interested in having a system that can project based on previous expenses to help with cash flow forecasting. It's insane that with 3 years of nicely classified data in xero we still have to more or less manually figure out what the next few months look like.

Super good point that we've found with our customers who are migrating from outsourced bookkeepers.

We're using our Slackbot as a friendly way for companies to get their financial data, the idea being that if the numbers are accessible/convenient and ones they want to know (revenue, burn rate, bank balances). Then, we can use the same Slackbot to provide other necessary financial details.

We're still working on this, but we think Gusto does a great job of communicating necessary (and not so exciting) info in a way that engages us.

For categorization, we're using ML (which learns over time and isn't rule based like Quickbooks' suggestions, which uses regex).

For the other pieces of bookkeeping, we're using integrations to automatically match invoices/payments (especially disjointed ones, eg invoice through QBO but pay separate via Stripe on client's website). We're also doing stuff like adjusting journal entries programmatically, like payroll accruals. For now, QB is providing the financial reports, we're doing the bookkeeping so their automated reports are accurate!

We're basically doing the services that a bookkeeper would provide on top of a client's Quickbooks software. QB is a tool and we aim to be a service.

We're using machine learning (supervised learning) to categorize transactions, generally expenses. We're using our users' past months' books as our training sets of correctly labelled data, so that we can use that data to train is really exciting for us!