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Problem
Small businesses hate expense tracking
Among the most common challenges encountered by companies, missing paper receipts topped the list — with as many as 50% of respondents saying it was one of their major pain points while tracking expenses.*
😡 Owners hate bookkeeping—More than 50% of small business owners report that bookkeeping is their least favorite task**
💸 Bad tracking costs heavily on tax deductions—42% of employees don't report business expenses due to lost receipts according to CapitalOne report
⏳ Time & resource consuming—Small businesses spend on average 120 working days per year on bookkeeping***
🐌 Financial reports lag behind—78% of respondents report that having immediate access to financial insights would make them more successful, and one in two said that this lack of clarity has negatively impacted their growth.****
🔍 Lacking granular clarity—Nearly a third of respondents (29%) didn't know which area of their business had the highest expenses, and 37% didn't know which vendor they'd invested the most in over the last three months or past year.****
🔆 Receipts must be kept for 3 years—Receipts are printed on thermal paper, which quickly fades and becomes unreadable if exposed to light, humidity, or temperature fluctuations. This makes an IRS audit a nightmare.
*https://bentoforbusiness.com/expense-management/what-sbms-can-learn-from-this-expense-management-survey/
**https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/240875
***https://www.icsid.org/uncategorized/how-much-time-do-small-businesses-spend-on-accounting/
****https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/survey-finds-majority-small-businesses-130000097.html
Solution
Easy Expense replaces headache with automation
Easy Expense solves a major pain point for our users by automating financial data aggregation.
Automating traditionally tedious business bookkeeping helps save time and money. People hate expense tracking but love us. We've gotten nearly 10,000 five star reviews to prove it!
📱 Mobile First & Offline—Expenses happen on-the-go and so should your expense tracking
📸 Magic Receipt Scanner—Reduce manual input and make receipt tracking enjoyable
💾 Digitalize Paper Documents—Paper receipts are easy to lose and fade quickly. Our digitalized versions are searchable, shareable and permanent
⏱ Continuous Tracking—Automation makes it easy to stay up-to-date, preventing expensive bookkeeping backlogs and providing timely business insights
🏦 Bank Account Linking—Automated labeling for debit and credit card purchases
🚗 GPS Mileage Tracking [coming soon]—Your phone goes everywhere with you; use your GPS to track $1000's in mileage deductions ($0.625 per mile for the IRS)
Product
A mobile-first approach to small business expense tracking
We all have a $1000 camera and GPS in our pockets. Easy Expense focuses on the expenses that are best collected by a mobile phone instead of a laptop.
Traction
700% YoY growth and over 250,000 app downloads
🔨 Lean startup, build fast approach—App launched in January 2020 after just 2 months of work.
💸 $5,000 MRR from donations—For the first year, Easy Expense was 100% free and users supported us with optional donations.
👪 Growing the team—Easy Expense made its first hires at the start of 2021. We spent 8 months rewriting the entire frontend and backend codebase to allow it to scale.
🚀 Easy Expense V2—New app launched in January 2022 with a successful migration and revenue per new user increased 4x.
🔍 Over $200M—Easy Expense has scanned 3M receipts and over $200M in expenses tracked at the start of 2022.
🍎 iOS launch—We first launched on only Android. Now our iOS app is taking off and has seen revenue growth of 400% from January to April 2022 (3 months).
Customers
Helping businesses track in real time & providing accountants innovative tech
Better tracking is a win for everyone.
Automation reduces the tedious task
for employees, owners and accountants.
👷 Sole proprietors & small businesses—The vast majority of our current paying customer base are US-based sole proprietors or small business owners with less than 10 employees.
50% of our new users report that they are just starting expense tracking. The majority (over 80%) of users tracking expenses keep a shoebox of receipts.
📚 Bookkeepers & accounting agencies—We have several large bookkeeping services that want to partner with Easy Expense and integrate our financial tracking with their services.
"Nearly three-quarters (71%) of respondents said that the use of innovative tools was an important factor when selecting an accounting firm.
80% of small businesses cited timeliness as the most important factor when selecting an accountant or accounting firm."*
These services have hundreds of businesses, which means thousands of end users. We also estimate that churn will be significantly lower for these users. So while the LTV of an individual business user may only be around $160, the LTV of a successful accounting partnership could easily be $250K or more.
Business model
High value, low cost
Our costs per user are low, allowing
us to pass savings onto our customers.
Customer Acquisition & LTV
Easy Expense is an extremely low-cost solution for expense tracking, allowing us to attract large numbers of users. We currently have about 80% organic installs and 20% paid (about 13K install in April 2022).
Android installs cost just $1.30 from paid ads; on average, a user who opens the Android app has a LTV of $4.74. iOS users cost $3.15 from paid ads; on average, a user who opens the iOS app has a LTV of $8.35. Our blended (paid & organic) CAC is below $0.50.
We currently only run Google and Apple search ads. We recently ran one YouTube ad which has performed extremely well. We hired marketing and expanded into Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Strategic Pricing
Currently, premium is $3/month for personal use, $8/month per user for business use.
We have an intelligent pricing strategy that prioritizes a positive user experience over squeezing our users for money.
Rather than lock our core content behind a paywall, we've opted to make unlimited receipt scanning, exporting, reports and summaries free. Instead, we charge a small subscription for a few premium features including multiple bank card links, team features, multiple workspaces and premium support.
We regularly give premium for free to users who are unable to afford it. Anyone asking for a refund will be granted one, no questions asked (as long as the App Stores will process the refund, which is limited in time).
This customer-friendly pricing strategy has allowed us to grow rapidly, but also provided us enough income to become profitable and bootstrapped for over 2 years.
In the long run, even users not paying for our services still add more value than they cost. They spread the brand, leave us 5-star reviews, label incoming transactions and receipt scans that are used to train the model further. Additionally, these users have potential to convert to paying customers in the future or generate revenue for Easy Expense through future offerings.
Market
$62B+ US Market
At $62 billion dollars, the bookkeeping and payroll space has huge opportunity. Easy Expense sits in the intersection of the bookkeeping and the global fintech market, which was worth $5.5T in 2019 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 23.58%.
50% of the companies surveyed said they were managing travel and entertainment (T&E) expense reporting manually, meaning they were using spreadsheets, pen and paper, or home-grown systems to maintain their day-to-day expense reports.*
Fintechs in this space are regularly being acquired for over 10x revenue and provide exciting strategic purchases for upstream companies like tax filing, insurance or loan companies.
Competition
The simple solution
The most common reason our customers give us for switching to Easy Expense is its simplicity and ease of use.
This is not an accident. We have listened to our customers and have been diligent about not building, and even removing, features that are not entirely necessary.
Most of the companies coming to us use a shoebox of receipts to track expenses. The value we add through our automation is obvious compared to paper receipts and manual data entry into Excel.
Expensify ($1.5B market cap) is perhaps the most similar application to Easy Expense. However, Expensify’s receipt scanner doesn’t work offline and takes minutes to process. While Easy Expense works both online and offline and scans receipts in just seconds, Expensify’s mobile app does not have all of the features of their web app. Their customers hate having to go to web to complete actions they wish they could do from their phones. We constantly get customers coming to Easy Expense from Expensify complaining that their product is too complicated and cumbersome.
Easy Expense has a few main differentiators compared to other expense tracking applications:
- 📱 Mobile First—Most established companies in this space are web app companies that have a mobile app as an afterthought. While a web interface might be better for certain expense tracking needs, it is not the ideal solution for businesses that are collecting receipts on-the-go. Their mobile apps are not feature complete and fail to function offline.
- 🏖 Simple—Rather than prioritize more features, we prioritize perfecting individual use cases. Many competitors are bloated with complicated features and customizations.
- 🤖 Data—We understand the value of data to improving our services. Many bookkeeping companies are prohibitively expensive, meaning they have only a few thousand large users rather than hundreds of thousands of users to provide useful data and insights.
Vision and strategy
Beyond data aggregation and scaling to $100M+*
Quarterly Revenue Projections
Path to 10x growth in 1.5 years
—
We plan to continue leveraging our datasets to exponentially increase the value we provide.
We are currently entirely focused on tools to help our users collect their financial data. In the future, we see huge potential value for our customers by helping them extract value from this aggregated data. This could be done through partnerships, in-house solutions, or a strategic acquisition of Easy Expense by a company able to add significant value.
For example:
📚 Bookkeeping/ Accounting—13% of our new users are actively looking for a bookkeeper and 75% don't currently have a bookkeeper. FinTech bookkeeping companies have offered us $300-$1000 per referral.
🔬 R&D Tax Credits—Companies like MainStreet help companies find tax credits, saving them $10,000's to $100,000's on taxes, and taking a percentage of the savings found. We already collect most of the data necessary to find these savings.
💳 Corporate Cards—The top 6 banks spend over $10B a year advertising while we can reach 100K+ users for free. Issuing a card is definitely on our radar, as it would help improve tracking for the users and provide a revenue stream through interchange fees.
💰 Tax Filing—We don't currently collect income information; but we are only a small step away from having all the information necessary to fully automate tax filing for most sole proprietors.
💸 Loans & Financing—We have lots of new businesses which require loans and financing. We also already link to bank accounts and track the financials needed for credit checks, providing an accelerated or pre-approved process to access capital for Easy Expense users.
💡 So Much More—From payroll automation to small business insurance, to offering workplace or sole proprietor benefits Easy Expense is perfectly positioned to connect new businesses with high value services.
Funding
Bootstrapped & profitable
To date, Easy Expense has been bootstrapped with no outside funding. Our founders' expertise has enabled us to produce the app without extensive hiring, keeping costs low and helping us reach profitability quickly.
Easy Expense is planning to raise $200K - $800k.
This money will be used to accelerate our growth. First by increasing our already profitable paid-user acquisition and second by increasing development velocity. Additionally, this money will help us focus on our long-term vision rather than short-term revenue optimizations.
Founders
Why us
Elijah Bucher has worked as a growth engineer helping to grow other mobile app startups. A wide work experience from software, design, business and marketing allowed Easy Expense to start with no seed capital and be a success.
Steve Laughton and Will Matous, who joined a year ago, are talented and experienced engineers. Working at mobile app startups such as Invoice Simple (another small business SaaS that successfully exited) gives them the perfect experience to round out the frontend and backend development team.
