| Hi Jeff, thanks for the questions! 1. A lot of the existing services are clunky and their API offerings are hard (though not impossible!) to use -- making them hard to interface with online applications. But for the most part, these are accounting software suites designed for a general audience, with an API offered. If you have a lot of microtransactions to process, or your application requires some financial logic baked in (gift cards, marketplace payouts, detailed account receipts for a insurance/co-pay splits, etc), having an API can help greatly. Additionally, our API is being designed with specific developer use cases in mind: general use cases like subscription billing, sane integrations with payment gateways like Stripe and Braintree, online invoicing, and tax reporting will be designed around online businesses and Saas applications. Again, software like QuickBooks is designed to be broadly used, and thus, may be harder for you to get started in (especially if you do not have an accountant handy). The API will always support general use (you can do whatever you want with the API!), but developer abstractions will be top-of-mind. 2, 3. I hear you and thank you for the concerns. These are all things that definitely need to be done before opening the product up. 4. Here are some benefits I see: - real-time financial stats that are updated as the transactions are made, and not just whenever the transactions are reconciled — and can be used (and understand) by everyone from the CFO to the accountant to the engineers - generate real-time account statements for users, just like your bank is able to provide you — you can control how much data you show to users using your own internal business logic - a secure financial data store that you can send GET requests to whenever you need the data. Examples where I see this doing well include in-app currencies and credit systems, gift cards, managing marketplaces and seller payouts, managing receipts, showing users detailed account statements, sales tax management, etc. - write scripts, perform analytics, and use the data/certain subsets of the data as you wish — it'll be much easier to export and analyze this data than with other software - saves you engineering time from building your own financial infrastructure, or trying to hook it up to other accounting software suites Also, more reporting endpoints (http://scribesend.com/docs#reports) will be added soon! Obviously, we're not 100% of the way there yet, but hopefully this clears things up a bit. |