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We've worked with a good amount of technical contractors over the life of this company. These days we have a solid core of full time and part time workers, and we're doing well enough that we can start to hire some of our best. Times are good, and the world is looking up.
But I remember the 'dark days' that we were in only a dozen months ago. We were three young guys with a solid business idea, hunting for reliable, capable, and honest technical ability that would help us create the company of our dreams. We struck out with a few of our contractors - they simply ran away with the first one or two payments, or were completely incapable of accomplishing the task, and slowed us down because of their obvious incompetence.
Sure, in hindsight it might seem so obvious that you're going to get 'played', but the fact is I'm sure its happened to more companies than my own. I diligently researched our contractors as best as possible, and it just seems like a fact of life that there are wolves (or simply dumb-dumbs with a heavy dosage of confidence) out there.
Last week I was consulting a friend of mine who is looking for his own technical resources, and it really started to irk me - I wish I would have `known` about these guys, or had somewhere to go out to and ask about their character and reliability (aside from the always positive references they provide).
Is there a database for this stuff? An Angie's List for developers? If not, who wants to make one with me?
For those of you in B2B startups, you may already know this, but for those still in B2C, I'll fill you in:
Handling vendor invoices can be a real pain, especially if you are trying to disrupt a truly rusting industry. My vendors still send paper invoices via mail, or, at best, PDF invoices via email.
However, vendor pricing data must be accurate in my systems, and the existing services are not perfect for a startup's needs. ACH can be a big risk to your cash flow, and credit cards, as Square is showing, have their inherent drawbacks. Also, OCR just isn't there yet, unless you have a form-style piece of paper, like a personal check.
So where does that leave startups like us, who are tracking more than just the 'Total Amount Paid' field, who want to digitize -everything- in their vendor payments for analysis?
My company is an information service for company's and their dumpsters. The product/pricing book for dumpsters is anything but simple. Every location has a different sized can, with various fuel surcharges, environmental fees, local government taxes, frequency of pickups, and so on. I want to track all of this, and so far, I've had to employ interns to do the data entry for us. And worst of all? There are millions of permutations of waste invoices. If I went with OCR, I'd really just be trading man-hours entering data for man-hours managing invoice templates.
ACH, as I said earlier, is a big risk because its -instant- ... Why do you think credit cards are so much more popular than debit cards? And even if I did ACH, I paid full price, before the full net-pay duration, and still lost out on the data.
'What about ERP Systems?!' - well thats an option, but they are massively 'clunky', and barely automate anything anyway - I'd still have to get a direct tap into my vendor's databases/ERP systems... Sounds like $ millions $ to me.
So I'm left with this question:
Why isn't there a universal API, or something similar, that companies like my own can tap into, and automagically track dozens of fields per invoice record? Get every vendor-type company to push data into the system, and BOOM - we've got an exchange.
If anyone wants to create that, you have my seed backing. Alternatively, if my Google skills just aren't as good as someone else's, and there is a better system than exists from what I mentioned above, please, please fill me in. Hoarding knowledge isn't cool, didn't philosophy teach you?!