Cashview is launching a product to solve a mundane but vital question: How much cash does your business actually have on hand and how are you managing it?
It is also announcing it has raised $6.5 million.
The Palo Alto company lets you store all your company transactions and related documentation on an online account, automatically processing recorded transactions so you can see a nearly real-time view of how much money is flowing in and out of your business. It lets you email PDFs of invoices into the system, creating a single place for you to view transactions.
Most small businesses rely on desktop-based accounting software like Intuit’s Quickbooks to help them track how much cash they are making and spending.
While these systems provide comprehensive ways of measuring the financial health of your business, they typically require employees to spend time manually entering information from printed invoices, whether checks the company is getting from customers or bills the company is paying to others — although even Quickbooks itself is developing an online version.
Cashview offers an appropriately bland, professional-looking interface that includes a calendar showing cash activity for each day, tabs for viewing incoming and outgoing payments, related documents, reports and other unsurprising accounting features. When the site requires you to manually fill out information — for example, to assign a manager responsibility for approving an expense — it shows you the digitized invoice next to the task you are assigning another person in the company.
The average amount a company pays to process a single invoice is somewhere between $3 and $34 dollars, mostly incurred from human processing, according to a report from research company Aberdeen Group last year (pdf).
Cashview’s service is free for now but the company plans to charge a monthly fee of $10 per user next year, along with a $1 transaction charge.
Larger businesses typically invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in complex accounting systems. They want to maintain complete control of their data, and may even be required to because of accounting regulations.
Cashview focuses instead on businesses with less than 500 employees, the “small to medium sized market” targeted by many other business-focused web applications. These smaller businesses have a lot to gain from a better product, with less to lose from trying it. Cashview focuses on cash, it says, because it’s one of the most important day-to-day statistics for any business to track.
Other recently-launched startups also ask you to share intimate financial details with them, including personal-finance tracker Mint and stock portfolio analyzer Cake Financial. Those companies have gone further than older competitors in asking you to provide logins for multiple banks or other financial institutions. While some critics have questioned the wisdom of giving vital financial information to startups, people and businesses hungry to save money find the risk worthwhile.
Cashview says that its team of finance-oriented veterans will help to allay security concerns. Its founder, René Lacerte, was previously a co-founder of Paycycle, a popular online service that automates organizations’ payroll processes. He still sits on that company’s board.
The company also integrates with the aforementioned Quickbooks and Quickbooks Online, and other standard accounting software that includes ways of accounting for inventory, taxes and other more general expenses.
It has previously received $2.1 million from DMC; this round was led by Emergence Capital, the backers of one-demand hit software company Salesforce.
Genius, which lets businesses track the behavior of customers visiting their Web site, has raised $19 million more in financing.