Subscribe for Float by Direct Debit with GoCardless

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Phil

I’m delighted to announce that as of today if you are are a UK customer you can subscribe for Float by Direct Debit through GoCardless instead of through PayPal.

GoCardless is a great new service that makes it easy for companies (like us) to accept payments online via Direct Debit. And for customers, it’s much nicer to use than PayPal and because it’s direct debit you’re protected by the Direct Debit guarantee.

If you haven’t subscribed to Float yet, subscribing with GoCardless is easy, first just hit the button on the payment page (if you’re new to Float why not start a free trial now):

You’ll then be taken to GoCardless, which will take you through the rest of the setup process:

We’re pleased to use and support GoCardless, as it’s great to see companies making online payments easier in Europe. You may have also seen that FreeAgent recently announced that you can even accept payments online for your invoices with FreeAgent’s recent integration with GoCardless. This is a great move, as anything that makes it easier for your clients to pay you should be good news for your cash flow!

If you have any questions, or if you are an existing subscriber who would like to switch to GoCardless, just drop us a line.

Struggling to stay on top of your business’s financials? Float can help. Start managing your cashflow better today by signing up for a free trial.

Already using Float? Spaces on our Founder Plan are going fast. Help shape Float and get a bargain in the process by grabbing yourself a Founder Plan now.

Introducing Float’s new Sales Pipeline

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Phil

A key part of building a good cash flow forecast for your business is having a good understanding of what income you are going to bring in over the next few months. This is often called something like your “sales pipeline”. A sales pipeline is useful for your business as it helps you keep track of:

How much you hope to bring in each month (in Float we call this your sales target).
What money you’ve actually brought in each month (these are the invoice receipts that Float imports from your accounting system).
How much money you are currently owed by customers, and when you should receive it (these are your invoices that Float imports from your accounting system).
What money you might make in the future if you win certain jobs or projects (in Float we call these projections).

Many CRM (customer relationship management) tools try to help you track some of these things, but no CRM tools actually tie these sales and potential sales back to your bank balance, to tell you how much money you will actually have in the bank in the future if you win/lose the work. This is why we have been building an improved sales pipeline screen for Float, and it’s looking great!

On top of the four items above, Float also adds projects, which let you group projections and invoices, to make it easier to find them, and see the effect on your cash flow if you do or don’t win projects.

Float’s new pipeline screen

Here’s the new pipeline screen in Float. At a glance, you can see your current cash flow forecast, as well as a more detailed breakdown of your sales pipeline for the next few months showing your sales targets, projections, open invoices, and paid invoices. In the table below the graphs you can also see any projects you have added to Float and how much they are worth.

If you want to see what happens if a project doesn’t happen, you can just untick the checkbox next to the project, and it will be removed from your forecast instantly and the graphs will show you what that means for your cash flow.

Detailed project view

If we jump into a project, we can see all the invoices and projections associated with that project. It’s really easy to add extra projections to a project (useful if you charge your customers in multiple phases), and you can also add any associated costs for the project (like sub-contractor costs).

You can also add any relevant notes about the project to help you keep track of what’s happening with them.

We think the new pipeline screen is going to really simplify the way you deal with upcoming projects, and let you really easily see the effect they will have on your cash flow – which is a crucial part of business planning. If you are an existing Float user, we haven’t turned it on for all accounts just yet, so just give us a shout if you would like to try it out!

Struggling to stay on top of your business’s financials? Float can help. Start managing your cashflow better today by signing up for a free trial.

Already using Float? Spaces on our Founder Plan are going fast. Help shape Float and get a bargain in the process by grabbing yourself a Founder Plan now.

Levelling Up

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Phil

For the last two years Float has been incubated by IfLooksCouldKill in a lovely basement office in Edinburgh (Scotland). Over the last few months, we’ve felt like it was time we found our own place – and as luck would have it, Edinburgh’s burgeoning startup scene has brought us TechCube - an ambitious project to convert a run down old university laboratory into a startup incubator/accelerator.

The insides of the building have needed a lot of work – false ceilings removed, carpets torn up, wooden boxing crowbarred out, walls demolished – so we’ve spent our last 8 weekends with a number of other Edinburgh startups in “demolition mode”. The first couple of floors are finally being decorated and carpeted – and rumour has it we will be moving in next week.

We’re really excited to be moving into our first “official” office, as well as to help build (literally!) Edinburgh’s startup scene. We’ll post some pics of the office once we’re in – but until then here’s some of work-in-progress shots.

Phil prepping desks for painting.

Colin gearing up.

Some more of the gang.

Did someone say cake?

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Phil

Photo credit: Will Clayton

We slightly missed the boat (ho, ho) on this one as we have been very busy, but Float turned two a week ago today.

For anyone who’s counting, the first line of code was written at 14:46 on the 7th of March, 2010. Since then we have:

launched our initial private beta
announced our pricing plans to our private beta users
got our first paying customer (thanks Madelyn!)
got a few more
completely rewritten Float to make it a heck of a lot better
so all that’s left to do is to officially launch (watch this space as it’s happening very soon!)

The real heroes in all this are of course all our customers. In particular, our founder members who have been amazing in supporting us, and continue to give us the great feedback we need to make Float a great product.

So Happy Birthday to us, thanks to all of you, and here’s to the next two years!

—

One last thing:

For the geeks/statisticians amongst you, here’s a (very rough) run down of some stats of the Float codebase (across both versions):

In the last two years, we’ve:

made 4182 commits
added 537,170 lines of code
deleted 266,563 lines of code

The new version of Float has a total of 14,106 lines of application code (i.e. code that we have explicitly written, not pulled in from other libraries. This is made up of:

CoffeeScript: 4955 lines
CSS (using sass): 3552 lines
Ruby: 2878 lines
HTML (as templates): 2721 lines

Counting down to launch

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Phil

I just got back from 3 weeks in the US, where I got to visit Boston, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and LA. The photo above is from highway 1 on the drive down. Absolutely great.

The main reason for the trip was this course at MIT which was mindblowingly good. I’ll hopefully write a bit more about that in another post.

In my absense Phil has put a lot of hard work into Float, and while its taken longer than we’ve hoped the early beta feedback we’ve been getting over the past few weeks has been very encouraging.

Our quest as always is to not over complicate the interface, and to strip out features, while we discover the most important ones.

We’ll be sending out more invites to the new version this week, and while its not perfect (it never will be!) there are some things we’re pretty excited about.

Here are a few headlines:

Easier Importing

You are now able to map your categories from FreeAgent to the ones you want in Float.

This means that instead of having to explain every transaction in Float, its immediately done for you on import.

Budgets

By setting up budgets, you’ll be immediately able to see how full up your budgets are, and drill into them to the transaction level.

Pipeline

Think of the pipeline as a mini – CRM. Here you can add all the potential projects you’re lining up, and any associated COS or COGS (Cost Of Sales or Cost of Goods Sold).

This should help build up an accurate picture of where you’re likely to be at any given point in the future.

Faster

As Phil wrote about in November the new version of Float has been rebuilt from the ground up, and cuts out a lot of unnecessary screen refreshes, and updates the figures a lot faster. Which make experimenting with scenarios a lot faster!

If you’re currently a user on the existing version of float and would like to take a look at the new version, just get in touch with us, and we’ll get you started.

Not long to go now!

Colin & Phil

An inside guide to the new Float (which is coming soon!)

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Phil

In Colin’s October update he hinted at some of the changes we are making to improve Float’s overall user experience, and we thought some of you may be interested in a bit more of a detailed run down of what we are up to.

Why?

The key to really getting your head around your business, and your cash flow, is to experiment:

What happens if this project were to start earlier, or later?
What if this invoice never gets paid?
What would happen if we all took a month off at Christmas and went on holiday?

As you ask these questions, and start seeing the answers, you can get a feel for how susceptible to certain events your business is – and you can start to know, rather than hope, that everything’s okay.

But for this to happen, Float’s interface has to be really fast, and smooth. You have to be able to make a quick change to something, see the effect on your graph, and then undo it again, in seconds.

The income forecasting screen was an initial attempt at enabling this kind of experimentation, but the big changes we are making now take it much further.

How?

The key to making this magic happen, is to move a lot of the cash flow calculations and modelling into your browser using JavaScript. This means that when you make a change, Float can recalculate the figures, update your graph, and show you the effect, all without having to refresh the page and wait for the page to load.

This shift to doing a lot of the heavy lifting of a web application in the browser is what makes applications like Gmail, Twitter and Flow fast, responsive and effective.

As an example, if you’ve ever changed one of your figures on the long-term cash flow screen, you know that it takes about 5 seconds for the page to reload and show you the updates. In contrast, in the new version of Float, recalculating your cash flow in JavaScript and updating the graph takes about 5 milliseconds. That’s 1000 times faster faster, and it’s awesome! Suddenly experimenting with your cash flow is actually good fun.

The Techy Stuff

Since a lot of you are building bits of the web yourselves, you’re probably intrigued to know what we’re using to build this latest version of Float. Here’s a run-down of the stack:

Backbone.js - Backbone is a JavaScript framework that helps you build complex applications in the browser. Switching to using a framework like Backbone, and building the majority of your application in JS is a paradigm shift that’s hard to get your head around at first – but Backbone is awesome once you get there.
CoffeeScript - If your a web design/development company that ever writes any JavaScript, stop right now and read about CoffeeScript. It’s simple to setup, and makes writing JavaScript a real joy.
Rails 3.1 - The latest release of Ruby on Rails has recognised how important supporting JavaScript heavy applications is, and makes building them a lot easier.

And if you want to start building JavaScript heavy apps yourself, Alex MacCaw’s book, JavaScript Web Applications is a fantastic read.

We’re hoping to start running some user tests on the new version in the next few weeks, so give us a shout if you’re interested in helping out with that. We then hope to go live sometime over the next month or two.

As always, if you have any questions, or want to know more, just drop as an email, or give us a shout in the comments.

JavaScript code photo courtesy of Dmitry Baranovskiy

October Update from the Float Yard.

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Phil

Hard to believe its October already, and in Scotland, we’ve jumped through all 4 seasons in the space of a week.

Today it felt like we were in the depths of winter, but I remember last Thursday sitting outside eating lunch!

Anyway sometimes it feels like that with software development. One moment you’re feeling great about it, the next you feel like its so slow and the limitations are so bad you may as well start again!

Well Phil had a bit of an epiphany about a month ago, and realised that for us to get to where we’re headed, we were going to have to make some pretty big changes to the way we’re currently doing things.

One of the driving forces behind building Float is to eliminate the need for spreadsheets. So we’ve always aspired to give the same ability to click into cells, and quickly interact with your data, but to give a lot more automatic pre-calculated information than you’d get if you’d built the spreadsheet yourself.

But doing all of those calculations was taking a huge hit on the speed of the application, and thinking about scaling, we just didn’t feel happy with the current performance. Also making improvements was taking a lot more time we wanted to.

So we started to think about what if we were able to make a lot more use of the browser and do a lot more of the work in javascript, rather than constantly hitting the server. Well, all I can say that after a few weeks of exploring this concept, the improvements are pretty staggering. Not only that, but we’re able to do so much more.

So where does that leave us?

Well we’re just about ready to start properly testing the new version, and looking more intensively at the user experience, and interface.

What are the benefits of the new system?

Apart from the speed and performance of the new system, we’re looking at 3 new areas: Budgets, Reports and Projects.

But I’ll leave those for another blog post! The other things of note, are that we’re making it much easier to change, include or exclude, and delete projections from your forecast. All this makes it much easier to speculate scenarios, and explore possiblities quickly.

We’re also desperately holding out for the release of the new FreeAgent API 2.0 which we’re are supposed to be getting some beta access to “really soon”. This is going to open up a lot of possibilities for Float, and we’re already excitedly planning those features, so we can roll them out as soon as possible.

Keep and eye on our tweets and blogs for info about the launch.

And as always we’ve hugely appreciated the early adopters out there who have sent in amazing feedback. The founders club 100 spots are filling up really nicely, and we’re feeling the love so thanks!

Colin

Happy Birthday! A reflection on the year… and a mini launch

Posted on July 26, 2011 by Phil

A year to the day – Phil & I were on a packed train, on our way to mini Seedcamp in London.

If I remember correctly we turned up at the practice pitch, and got absolutely slated for our poor presentation, which was very helpful, and saved us from making a hash of it in front of a roomful of very smart people the next day!

Seedcamp was a great experience, we met some awesome people, and getting through to the second day, really consolidated our belief in ourselves and the product, and was definitely a turning point.

After that, in August Phil took a big risk and came on board for 3 days a week, and we worked hard to let our first beta testers into a pretty rough cut first draft.
Thankfully, we had some amazing alpha testers who stuck with us, and really helped us refine and build Float into what it is today.

In November we hit 200 subscribers, won an innovation award from Edinburgh University, and Phil handed in his notice to start working on Float full time in the new year.

January to March was a slow process of some deep dives into the code and really wrestling with the complexity of a growing product.
We released a new wizard to help people signing up for the first time, and that definitely increased the number of people who went on and set up an active cash flow forecast.

April. We felt we needed to come back to basics and simplify Float back to the core functions. At the end of April we launched a significant new release v0.8 and also were busy preparing to present at EIE11.

Jun. We launched v0.9 of Float in preparation for opening up our beta. The feedback was great, and we knew we were close to something that was simple but powerful enough to do accurate projections.

July. We released our payment plans for our beta users, and received our first revenue! Since then we’ve had a great take up of our plans, specifically our Founders Plan. Which is a special early adopters club, limited to 100 people for a life time subscription. Its been a huge success, and we have a great bunch of people who we’ll share a little more closely with and give a higher level of support to. For us it helps with our own cash flow, and provides further validation that we’re building something that people want.

The Future: Right now we’re just working on tidying a few things up in the app before we launch fully.
We’d working on making the reconcile process much quicker, adding budgets and a few other secret ingredients.

So its definitely been a happy birthday, and we’re excited about where we’ll be this time next year…

Colin

PS
Some wise words from Steve Jobs about looking back.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA]

In the press

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Phil

If you are a reader of Accounting Web, you may have spotted a nice little article they wrote about Float earlier this week. It was a nice surprise, and a good reminder that a lot has happened since we last blogged.

As Accounting Web mentioned, we are now closer than ever to being live. We currently have more than 170 users on our closed beta, and are wrapping up development of a major new release which will launch us into open beta.

Improvements you can expect to see soon include:

A quicker and easier first time setup experience.
Simpler importing of your recent transactions, bills and invoices from FreeAgent.
An overall simpler interface.
Sexier, interactive, animated graphs.

Here’s a quick preview of what’s on the way. And finally, if you would like to be added to our beta waiting list, and stay updated on our progress, sign up for our mailing list at http://floatapp.com

Season’s Greetings

Posted on December 24, 2010 by Phil

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from both of us at Float.

It’s been an exciting year, and we are thankful to you all for your support. Special thanks to our current beta testers, who have been giving us some great feedback—and thanks to everyone else who is still waiting for a long overdue invite to try out Float. We’re adding more invites with each new release, so if you’re still waiting, it should be coming soon.

Our latest release has improved integration with your invoices and bills in FreeAgent, and in response to your requests, we’re working hard to release a quick setup wizard. We look forward to 2011, and to getting all of you trying Float out, and hearing how it can help your business.

Thanks again and all the best for the Christmas season. If you have any thoughts or questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch athello@floatapp.com.

All the best,