Launch HN: Modernbanc (YC W20) – Modern and fast accounting software
If you're familiar with the issue tracker Linear, think of it as Linear for accounting software. It is fast, works offline, and saves you time with automated bookkeeping, accounting and invoicing.
This is our third pivot. Previously, we built infrastructure like a ledger API and payments vault to help companies create fintech products.
For this idea, our motivation came from two completely opposite experiences: using Linear and using Quickbooks. The difference in quality between the two products was shocking, and despite there being dozens of accounting tools, none come even close to the quality of Linear, Notion, or Figma.
With Linear, I’ve heard stories of engineers threatening to quit if their company switches to another tool! With Quickbooks it takes me so long to get to the right page that sometimes I forget why I opened it.
This was baffling to us because accounting is the core system of every business—it tells you what you have, what you made, and whether you’ll still be around in 12 months.
To solve this, we took a Linear-like approach, focusing on speed and quality from day one. For example, we built our own in-house real-time sync engine to ensure it’s lightning fast, works offline, and keeps your business finances at your fingertips.
Modernbanc is still early and doesn’t have every feature yet, but we believe we’ve built a long-term foundation for the best accounting software in the world. It even includes a built-in spreadsheet so you’re never limited in reporting.
Although early, the software is already useful and helps founders: Automate bookkeeping effortlessly. Transaction rules and AI smart actions handle the work for you. Get answers to any question, including runway, burn, and custom budgets, all in one place; Create and manage invoices. Our AI will auto-match incoming payments to them; Be tax-ready with all the data available for seamless tax filing. And if you don’t have an accountant, we’ll find you one!
We’ll have more releases in the coming weeks including receipts matching, payroll integrations and AI-powered report generation.
We’ve just launched (mainly focusing on smaller US-based startups) and would love your feedback! Please give it a go at https://modernbanc.com (you’ll see a demo workspace once you sign-up).
We’d love your feedback! If you’ve ever been frustrated by accounting software, what has been the worst part? What features are missing? Have you ever had to rely on a spreadsheet because your accounting tool could not do what you needed? We are still early, so your input will help shape what we build next. If you have thoughts, frustrations, or ideas, we would love to hear them!
117 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadI've looked into accounting software for our startup in the past. Xero, Quickbooks, and simply hiring an accounting firm.
We ended up hiring an accounting firm for full service so I can totally not focus on this at all, and we don't have to have an operations staff member dealing with bookkeeping.
That said, I feel like there should be a solution that is totally automated, that can just sync with our bank account and handle everything. The full service accountants aren't perfect, the interface is just phone calls and emails. The bookkeeping itself doesn't seem like too much human work for them; they mostly just load things into quickbooks anyways and send us a report. it's mostly the tax filings where they come in handy. That and on the off chance we need audited financials for diligence, we need an accredited third party firm.
Bookkeeping. It's something I'm perfectly capable of doing, but it would be a mistake for me to be spending my time and energy on this; myself and our staff should be focused on unique things that advance our core product and business.
On your pricing page you say 'growth: request a quote." Solutions like pilot are transparent about their pricing but it's actually no better than the more traditional accounting firm we chose. I realize it's early, but it would be important for me to be able to estimate the pricing before I invest any time or effort to try this out -- even for a free trial.
Is there is a free plan or is it just a trial for certain number of days ?
Anyway, I know I don’t have time and I know 14 days isn’t really even enough time to test drive it anyways. So, it is a trial period that really just pushes me away from signing up. Had I signed up and had unlimited time to do all my setup/config/integration works, which I’m in no hurry so may take a few months (of mostly inactivity), then I may close my books in tandem with my current system a couple times and you should reach out to bill me once I’ve closed 2-3 acccounting periods. That would give you a great opportunity to get feedback from me on what I like or dislike having gone through a couple month end reps and sell me on making this my core accounting product. But, since you turned me off initially with the 14 day free trial thing neither of us will ever know.
It's nice that you're offering a longer trial period for people who specially request it, but what they're saying (which I 100% agree with, and am also not in the market for accounting software, to be clear) is that you're likely to lose out significantly with such a short period. My guess is if you offered a 3-month trial period you'd get over 10 times as many signups.
Just my 2 cents.
The only way the 14-day period seems like a good idea to me from a (short-sighted) business standpoint is if there are significant problems with your software that don't reveal themselves until books for the month are done. That way you can get some conversions (followed by cancellations when they run into those shortcomings) from people who wouldn't convert if you offered a longer period.
If you're worried about large customers taking advantage and becoming difficult to service for such a long period, another model is to offer a free tier with up to X data, Y records, etc. That way you'll be appealing to smaller businesses for whom this is roughly 3 months of accounting services, and perhaps less so to larger businesses who usually take much longer to convert anyway.
If you give the user time to get through all of the integrations/setup steps, you should be even more confident in your ability to convert them as they're invested at that point.
If you're worried about the 'load' of a user on your SaaS, then you have bigger issues to solve because the unit economics of having a low usage/free tier user should be essentially free. If a user does require a lot of human touch/support during their trial, then I feel like you handle that manually on a case by case basis. It's likely going to be rare and you can decide how to handle (eg. talk to them about paying for support / moving to a paid plan / etc). I tend to believe you're missing out on the learning and feedback loop from these types of users even if you perceive them as unprofitable or what have you.
The original intent behind 14 days was to force a deadline onto user to get set-up properly and realize value of the product. (Seeing their financials in real-time)
Though the comment above justifiably mentioned that some folks might want an entire accounting period to run books in parallel while evaluating. We'll keep looking into this.
Right now if you suspect an error in AI response you can flag it/submit as feedback. For anything that AI does without your input (bookkeeping) we associate a confidence with it and when below that threshold we get a human in the loop.
We know that trusting AI with financial info is hard which is partially why we have the sheet (so that the AI can backup it's claims).
That may be your next pivot, if you are not careful, or maybe if you are.
I did two semesters in college interning on an application like this which did not survive, and one of the things that kept coming up in comparables was that the biggest competition was not Quickbooks, the biggest competition for small/medium sized business accounting has always been Excel.
The product I worked on thought it could succeed with deep Excel integration, both imports and reporting, and possibly even being installed right next to Excel out of the same box. In the end, Excel won and the product was axed, because of course Excel won (even despite the product working to diversify its revenue to moat its budget in interesting ways).
However, what is Linear? It's impossible to search for what it might be because it's a common word that I search for in other contexts extensively.
One of the key takeaways that I had was that Intuit viewed accounting as a three-way market where the professional accountants were the most important factor when it came to the product design. Customers generally don’t care what software gets used and will pick whatever their accountant recommends. As such, only certain workflows prioritized ease of use and being intuitive. Business owners want to go in and see reports on how their business is doing, but when it comes to actually doing the books, they don’t care. And accountants see the unintuitive parts of Quickbooks as a moat. They’ve put so much time and effort into learning to use such a poor UI, that they see a lot of their value in skillfully navigating that “bad” UI. There’s a ton of hidden tricks that have evolved over the years and get passed from accountant to accountant and they’ll scream bloody murder if Intuit tries to change them. It was funny to hear how much effort was being put into replicating weird interaction patterns from Quickbooks Desktop when they were creating Quickbooks Online and trying to migrate customers over.
My advice to you is to try to find professional accountants who will let you observe them using Quickbooks or Xero. I can almost guarantee that they’re using those products very differently from the way you do. And don’t assume that just because Quickbooks UI sucks, making a better UI will make you successful. Having worked with them, the people in charge of Quickbooks Online are very talented and plenty capable of making a more intuitive UI. The choice not to is intentional and based on a lot of history and strong relationships with their professional accountant community. There will always be some small business owners who try to go it alone, and they really do need more intuitive accounting solutions. In general, I thought Wave was pretty good at targeting that segment the last time I looked at it. But the money there is tiny. And if you want to be hugely successful, you have to understand accountants and why they choose Quickbooks.
That said, we think the landscape is shifting. AI and automation are changing how accounting gets done, and the next generation of software won’t be about preserving unintuitive workflows. It’ll be about eliminating unnecessary manual work and giving both businesses and accountants better tools.
QuickBooks has deep roots, but businesses today expect more than just accountant-approved tools. They want real-time insights, automation, and software that works for both them and their accountants.
Shameless C&P:
If you do not use Quickbooks:
* Your bank will hate you.
* Your investors will hate you.
* Your payroll system won't work.
* Your tax systems won't work.
* Your accountant won't work.
* Grants are even off the table in some cases.
* Some places won't audit without Quickbooks.
* Your bank will hate you.
* Your investors will hate you.
* Your payroll system won't work.
* Your tax systems won't work.
* Your accountant won't work.
* Grants are even off the table in some cases.
* Some places won't audit without Quickbooks.
1. The ability to input a list of cost centers/accounts and export all journal entries to Excel is a requirement
2. An Excel add-in is a better selling point than the built-in spreadsheet feature.
We think that’s a powerful complement to Excel, not a replacement. And of course, exporting to Excel/Google Sheets is always an option.
This is clearly not an attempt to replace Excel, it's an attempt to accomplish a set of use cases in a better way than clunky export-import flows.
The in-app sheets look great, keep going!
> This is clearly not an attempt to replace Excel, it's an attempt to accomplish a set of use cases in a better way than clunky export-import flows
This is exactly how we think about this too.