Jot Thought

We are happy to announce that GoBootstrap.com is now open to the public. We have been receiving some good press over the past week. If you are a sole proprietorship and tired of using spreadsheets to track your income and expenses, sign up now.

Well, it took us about a week longer than we thought, but we just released a major upgrade to Paybackable. There are 2 key elements to the release:

1. The ability to create company accounts and add employees
2. We added paid account plans

We also rolled out a new look and feel that was created by real designers, as opposed to Kevin hacking around.

So we’ll be giving DHH’s “advice” a whirl and trying to actually charge money for a useful web service.

If you know any small companies who want to simplify their online expense reporting, please send them our way

In case you haven’t seen these yet, compare the following two videos from StartupSchool ‘08: the first by Greg McAdoo at Sequoia and another by David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 Signals and Rails fame.

We found them both particularly interesting because we are currently wrestling with the decision of whether to try to go raise money for our company or continue bootstrapping it. We have two products in the market: Paybackable, which provides very simple online expense reporting and has a bunch of users and Bootstrap, which is in private alpha. We are close to releasing a major upgrade to Paybackable that will add support for company accounts and employees. The release will also introduce paid plans, much like 37Signals’ products. So we’re about to learn first-hand how difficult it will be to try the approach in David’s video.

For Bootstrap, it’s a much grander vision and frankly, we don’t know if we can afford to do it justice in a reasonable amount of time by funding it ourselves. Hence the interest in raising money. We’re gathering as much advice as possible and will begin getting feedback on our pitch very shortly. But it seems clear that once we head down this path, it’s go big and exit or bust.

So we’re at an interesting crossroad. Do we shoot for the stars? Or do we try to become a “lifestyle” company - to use a popular term in the private investing space. Right now, all we know is that there are some pretty important problems that we can solve for small business owners like ourselves. We’ll see what the future holds.

If you look up the IRS instructions for tracking business miles, you won’t find the word odometer. And yet most solutions in the market ask for starting and ending odometer readings to calculate mileage.

We wrote a post about a better way to calculate mileage over on our Paybackable blog, including how we’ve made it easier to do so from Paybackable itself.

Self employment is about to get easier…

We have officially moved into private alpha on Bootstrap, our first major homegrown application. We aren’t saying much about it at this point while select users are banging away on it. But we can say this - it will definitely increase the time an entrepreneur can spend growing a business, rather than dealing with the hassles of running it. It’s entirely web-based and will work on all the major browsers…:-)

If you would like to learn more about Bootstrap, go to our home page at www.gobootstrap.com and submit your email. We’ll keep you posted as we open access to more folks and unveil specific features.

QuickenMobile , a cool little app we built for Intuit, was launched at MacWorld this week. It sends you text messages with balances and recent transactions for your bank and credit card accounts. We built it in JRuby on Rails to interface with Intuit’s java-based aggregation web service and deploy within their java stack. Here’s the beta sign up screen.

In addition to the transaction aggregation and sms capabilities, one of Intuit’s own, Zach “Money” Moneypenny built an iPhone interface for the application. He was working the show when we stopped by - here he was bringing it up on his iPhone.

Have to say, it was cool seeing something we built being demoed at MacWorld. We even heard that a senior member of the Google mobile team found it to be pretty cool. It was also very nice to see the other apps the Quicken team were showing off. In addition to QuickenOnline, which also just launched, they were demonsrating the coming version of Quicken for the Mac. What I found particularly interesting is that the entire program is being re-written from the ground up using Cocoa. From what I saw, it looks great. They’re about to go into Beta and both Ben and I signed up. Here’s a pic of what I like to call Cocoa Quicken…

We didn’t spend a ton of time at the expo, but while we were there it was pretty crowded. The logistics of getting in were terrible - our passes didn’t have promo codes, which the registration software required, there were tons of different lines with the exact same signs above them, and the badging process was a hilarious cluster. I’d be curious to know the results of a process excellence evaluation of IDG’s logistical approach. But I shouldn’t complain - I wouldn’t want to solve that issue for a living.

We did stop by the MacBook Air, though it took some effort to actually get your hands on one. It was kind of funny that everyone one wanted to pick them up and play with them, but you had to keep them over the counter. Made for an interesting dynamic (see pic below:)

Our final stop before heading out was to chat with the folks at NeatReceipts, who were showing off their receipt scanning solution for the Mac. We’re talking to them about integration with Paybackable and our “kinda secret” forthcoming app. Stay tuned for more on that.

We released an update to Paybackable.com this morning that adds mileage expense tracking. It uses up-to-date IRS rates (now 50.5 cents per mile for 2008) to calculate how much you can get reimbursed for those business miles. Just enter the date of travel, a description (purpose of trip, destination, who you saw, etc.) and the miles driven and Paybackable will calculate the correct amount.

One other interesting note about this feature: it actually solves a gap in QuickBooks. Their vehicle mileage tracking feature doesn’t support reimbursing employees for their miles. To quote their support site: “You cannot use vehicle mileage tracking to reimburse your employees for mileage.” Their suggested solution is to create a bill payable to the employee (or vendor) with line items for the trips. This is precisely what Paybackable does, which is nice.

Check it out at www.paybackable.com

Well, we got frustrated enough with handling our own out-of-pocket expenses that we wrote a small app to help create online expense reports. It’s live at http://www.paybackable.com. It lets you track expenses and submit expense reports as IIF files for import into QuickBooks. It will also pull the expense categories from a QuickBooks chart of accounts IIF file so everything matches up. There are some nifty elements, like auto-complete of payee names with memorized categorization, plus keyboard shortcuts for quickly changing the date.

While it’s been very helpful for us (took the whole process from 20-30 minutes per expense report down to less than 5), we were wondering if anyone else might find it useful. Feel free to give it a try and let us know what you think. You can email me (Kevin) at esomnie dot com

Yahoo! just launched the Yahoo! Teacher’s website that we developed for them. The most interesting part of the site is the school map used to register teachers under the Peer Network section of the site. We used the Yahoo! Map API to plot the Great Schools data on it. Learned a lot about the Yahoo! Map api to create custom markers and did some interesting AJAX techniques to keep the right list of schools in sync with the map. If I have some time, I’ll write another post on some of the techniques we used. Take a look and let us know what you think.