We know that small businesses are passionate about what they do, providing great services to their customers with the ability to be in charge of their own destiny. We also know that most are less excited about the admin that’s involved with running a business – having to stay on top of payments, expenses, receipts and documents.
We’ve already built some great features to help you. Our invoicing tool helps you to get paid faster, our receipt capture reduces the amount of paper you have to store in shoeboxes, and our invoice-matching functionality lets you know when you get paid and helps to keep your books in order.
Spending categories
And now, we’re happy to introduce Spending Categories – which we’re launching alongside a rework of our income categorisation and invoice-matching tools.
We’ve been speaking to a lot of small businesses over the last few months, some are Mettle customers and others aren’t, trying to understand exactly where the pain points lie and what solutions could genuinely help.
When it comes to bookkeeping, the feedback we get is pretty consistent…
It’s difficult to keep up
There’s no certainty that everything you need is there
Increased anxiety knowing there is a big part of your business that you feel like you’re just not on top of
Additionally, we keep hearing that the link between how you keep your books, what your accountant expects, and what software packages are built for it – is broken.
This felt like a great area for us to address. We wanted to build a tool that helps consolidate your bookkeeping data so that it’s up to date, it’s in line with what accountants expect, and can seamlessly integrate into the leading accounting packages.
Our comprehensive spending categorisation tool gives you an extensive list of categories similar to the one used by our bookkeeping partner FreeAgent. This means that you’ll now have an accounting package that speaks the same language as your banking app.
It also means that in the near future (we’re working on this right now), all transactions you categorise in the Mettle app will flow seamlessly to FreeAgent, so you only have to enter them once.
Simple and straightforward set up
Creating a tool that is rich in its options, like a comprehensive categories tool, is challenging from a user-experience perspective. We wanted to make sure you have all the options in front of you, while having a simple and intuitive experience in the app.
So we’ve listed the most commonly used categories first. In order to do that, we looked at data from over six million categorised transactions to determine the most popular categories for business use. You can of course select other categories if you scroll, but we thought that giving you a shortlist of frequent categories as well as a search function, would be a nice touch to offer on day one.
We also reworked how we categorise income. Our invoice matching tool continues to operate like it did before, but we’ve made changes to our non-sales categories so they’re on the same chart of accounts as our expense categories.
If you’ve used our categories in the past, don’t worry – we’ll migrate all your transaction categories to the new set automatically and you don’t have to do a thing.
We also listened to your feedback. You told us that you’d like to categorise incoming transactions as ‘Sales’ without matching them to an invoice, and the new tool allows you to do that too.
We’ve invested a lot of effort in our categories feature, validating it with many businesses and testing it with individual users, and we believe we have something that could really help you in running your business.
In these challenging times, we keep on exploring ways to help you focus on what matters most. If you have any thoughts, questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line in our in-app chat.
