Not sure if you guys are looking for actual SW product ideas to be funded or not but here’s one. 

Accounting products like QuickBooks are easy to use and have sold something like 20 million copies, mostly to small businesses. While QB is great at keeping track of invoices, paying bills, payroll, etc. it is basically looking backwards in time. 

What small businesses need is a way to “project” what their invoice activity (payments) will be in the future. To do that you need to be able to create a “projected invoice stream” and compare that with your projected expenses. Looking out 3-4 months is best. 

For example, QB can not tell you today that you will be short cash in 45 days because three of your clients will be paying late. Maybe if you could see the impact you’d ask for a bigger deposit on the next project and then you’ll be fine. Actionable information is what small businesses need. 

For eight years now OakTree has been using a dual worksheet Excel spreadsheet to create a view of cash that is not possible today in QB. Frankly, I don’t know how small businesses are able to run without a tool like this. 

We’ve looked into building a QB add-on product but don’t have the capital to do it ourselves. We’d need to employ 1-2 ASP.NET programmers, a good UI person, a project manager, QA tester, at least. 

$250K would go a long way to creating a working, QB integrated cash management tool for small businesses. 

John Schmitt, OakTree Digital