Scred Comes Out With A New Focus
Scred, a house hold Finnish startup who we have used to seeing tracking debts and shared expenses is now shifting their focus towards more comprehensively managing money.
They start with managing money for different groups such as bands, indie film crews, event organisers and associations. The point is to offer a solution for communities which often don't have good online financial applications and don't know about accounting.
Along with the new focus the guy have also redesigned the site. Kudos to the team for learning the design tools as they went along. As Kristoffer from Scred told me "We ended up learning how to do design ourselves as we couldn't find anyone sufficiently skilled and available to work with our bootstrapped approach". Whether that was a good choice, I left to the user to decide herself.
The team at Scred also completely rewrote the accounting core, based on the feedback and experience of the old service. The service has now fully integrated with the new PayPal X API — and is one of the first companies to do so. The new Scred allows groups to send out invoices, track and pay expense claims, sell items with an integrated shop, collect registration fees and send payments. The key here is that all the payments are accounted automatically, depending on what activity was involved. Scred can thus automatically generate profit, loss and revenue calculations, as well as get reports on all aspects of the group's finance. It's almost like ...well, a bank, where you don't just transfer money (numbers moving from one database to another), but you actually add context with attachments, what it was for, who was involved, what was ordered, where it took place etc.
Scred will be taking a small transaction fee for money moved.
What do I think? I think they are on their way to making the Mint (or Balancion) for small businesses. There are few things in life as boring and as off-putting as doing accounting, yet most of the people running a company need to deal with that in some form. If Scred can enable a firm to manage all its accounting online in one location with a one click submission to the accountant to review the accounts, I think they are onto something. Secondly, small and medium sized businesses are a significantly bigger market than bands or hobby groups, and since Scred's business is based on transaction fee this means Scred could be a bigger business too.
Scred is also taking part in the PayPal X Developer Challenge with around 50 other companies. You can check out their new focus on video below.
Scred PayPal X Developer Challenge from Scred Ltd on Vimeo.
I tried to order something from the Alt MiniCorp Store and it gave me FATAL ERROR! OH NO!
But anyway nice to see Scred expanding!
Oops, indeed. We saw the error and started immediately investigating. It appears there's a surprise limitation in one Django messaging framework. If you try the shop when logged in it should work, but not currently as a guest. We are going to work around this limitation and conjure up something.
Did I get this right: a 100e transaction incurs a 1.5% fee from scred (1.5e), plus 3.4% + 0.35e from paypal (6.9e). Total transaction fees for 10e being thus 8.4e or 8.4%. Kind of expensive if you ask me...
I think you miscalculated :-) 0.034 * 100 + 0.35 + 0.015 * 100 = 5.25.
PayPal costs vary, and we have no control over them. Sometimes it is in fact substantially less. With the new PayPal X functionality it depends on a number of variables.
Having said that, many other services will charge you a good bit more and offer you less. One should remember that the PayPal pricing includes credit card fees.
At Scred we are using the new PayPal Adaptive Payments APIs. As these APIs are a relatively new addition to PayPal's product portfolio, the pricing model is still evolving. As a rule of thumb the Adaptive Payments pricing is similar to what one would pay using the old PayPal APIs (eg. Website Payments Standard).
As Kristoffer already noted PayPal's fees are something you would be paying anyway. What we add on top (1.5%) is rather competitive compared to many other services which otherwise offer a lot less. Some examples: Eventbrite 2.5% + $0.99 per ticket; Etsy 3.5% + $0.20 per item; Cartfly 3%; Kickstarter 5% (includes Amazon's fee). All of these prices are something that is charged in addition to PayPal's fees (except Kickstarter).
The unfortunate fact in the land of electronic payments is that credit card charging costs, well, a fortune - thanks to fraud.
I hope you guys really consider using a professional UI designer.
I think that you have good concept, but application just looks unprofessional. I wouldn't probably even try it if I would be looking for similar software and randomly found Scred.
I'm sorry you still think it looks bad. It's true that a lot of the old areas of Scred have yet to be moved over to the updated look, but we do feel that the overall feel, and the new functionality, look much better than what we had before. Less of a techie design and more solid. Overall most people seem to agree that it is much better. I'd still recommend having a look at the new features and letting us know what you're not happy with.
Believe me, it is not a policy decision that we have not hired a pro UI designer. It is a matter of resources. We're a small and unfunded company — we need to work with what we have and do the best we can. Hopefully we'll try our best to improve things further!
Oh, and by the way, we've got the details on the PayPal X Developer Challenge voting on our blog at
http://bit.ly/scred-paypal
The process is a bit cumbersome, but we really do appreciate every bit of support. Cast your vote and grab a beer on us at the next Night of Code event! ;-)
Kristoffer, thanks for your reply. I hope that I did not sound harsh - I didn't mean to. You guys are doing a great job, but I am pretty sure that design is your biggest bottleneck at the moment. For a site that handles money it is very important to look professional. Not sexy, hot or trendy, but professional.
I really hope that you get some help on that front!
Antti, don't worry. We need and love to get feedback. I promise that the first or second person we recruit will be a designer — unless we can get one in some other way, as a share holder or similar.
Great Stuff! I have cast my vote for you and will get the word out.
Thanks, John, greatly appreciated - every vote helps!