Moving forward with financial productivity in 2020

The need for financial productivity and the continued move forward of financial data democratization have been the drivers in 2019 and will be in 2020, Guiding us to empower you further with a solid service to track all your financial movements, to do a sound financial control and develop professional services all in your Google Cloud environment.

The driving force

Financial productivity

The financial (service) industry is under pressure as the lack of significant innovation left them either with a cost inefficient business model and, or a model that does not attend customer demand anymore, as they have machines to take over traditional manual tasks and assist them to better execute their functions,creating new opportunities. This gap with reality further widens with new regulatory mandates, investor exigency, startup competition and technology innovation.

Our focus therefore has been on features that simplify the dataflow behind finance and accounting on Google Cloud, to improve financial productivity.

Financial data democratization

Regulations like PSD2 (Payment Services Directive) across Europe, the competitive advantage of open banking standards or APIs, digital banks, Startups and digital currencies push this democratization each time further and the pace is increasing, making it more than ever clear that you will have to be able to manage your own financial data in a consistent way.

But how? Where are you going to keep all that data and with what purpose?

Developing your own solutions would be very costly and just keeping the data in buckets will be useless over time.

So, the key has been to enable you to collect as much data as you need from as many different sources as you want in a simple way, categorize it at your desire so you are in full control of it and use this information in meaningful ways.

The results of this driving force in 2019

You can find all new features releases of 2019 in our changelog and the following three features highlight our commitment to your control and financial productivity.

Bkper Bank Connections

The usage of OFX file imports via Drag & Drop or through the Google Drive integration and the many requests to optimize bank account consolidation gave us a solid indication that there is a lot to gain, if you could simplify this and all related tasks.

The choice to work with a service provider quickly felt on Plaid as they, just like us, aim to attend customers and banks worldwide and their expertise and efforts to provide a secure and robust service could never be surpassed by our own efforts.

“Bank connections are a game changer.”

Evgeny Dmitriev, from Inca Digital securities

The current Beta version of Bkper Bank connections confirmed the optimization of consolidating bank statements in two ways. First, the clear reduction of time spent on tasks of collection, sorting and updating systems and Secondly through process and decision optimization due to having realtime time financial data available.

Bkper Bank connections is work in progress, we’ll continue to improve better status information about connections and pull pending transactions to Bkper that are updated as they change their status at the institution.

BkperApp Library

No two financial data flows are the same and trying to fit all in one software solution now just seems kind of a crazy idea. Wouldn’t it be great if you could build, control and quickly adjust your own solutions for your financial processes?

In the 2018 review we foresaw the Rest API and the use of Bots to fulfil this desire, instead we pushed to improve our Google Apps Script Library the BkperApp. An easier, solution than a Rest API and more flexible than Bots are. So, we did a complete haul over of the GS library making typos available to develop your own solutions in Typescript on Visual Studio using Clasp.

The library built on top of the Bkper rest API allows you to use simple scripts to automate tasks and build solutions for everyday situations that you can easily adapt or improve.

Also, through the needs that come with the use of the GS library, the Bkper REST API itself becomes more robust and tested before publication and consumption as SKU on the GCP Marketplace.

The simple ability to create your own solutions, just as in Google Workspace, enables our most successful customers to scale their services, automate tasks with simple scripts and apply simple adjustments fast as their business needs change.

Bkper Functions for Google Sheets

The new Bkper functions have a great impact on your reporting capabilities as Financial data becomes alive by consulting it through simple formulas in the same way you use Google sheet functions. It is the most powerful productivity hack that changes how you are doing finances on Google Cloud now. To describe this you can think of how you are doing financial reports and how much time and effort it takes to prepare statements (for many clients), in different scenarios.

“Onboarding new clients has become effortless with Bkper Functions. I simply copy a standard book and report for their sector, and I can instantly provide them with meaningful information and make adjustments on the go. Now, I focus much more on scaling our service.”

Fernando David, from Contabnet

The Bkper Templates show how easy it is to copy a Template (book & report) and be up and running within no time.

In Numbers

• We passed 4M Posted Transactions.
• A single user posted more than 220K total transactions.
• A single user posted more than 20K transactions in a month.
• A single user shared a booked with 19 users.
• A single user has 40 active books.
• 99,927 registered users from more than 130 countries.
  
  
  

In 2020 you can expect

We’ll continue to focus on delivering value according to your needs so for the next year you can look forward to see new developements in the following areas.

Reports

Many noticed that we’re doing well on the input side of Bkper and that it’s time to help you on the practical side of reporting. So, for 2020 you can expect developments towards the generation of customizable Pdf files from your financial data in Bkper.

Mobile

Our mobile solution hasn’t seen any major improvements in a long time and most changes were motivated because of operating system updates. Since feedback and surveys show that the mobile experience is worth improvements you’ll likely see moves in the direction of one PWA app that gives you an unified UX over all devices.

Thank you all for your amazing energy and input! It is what empowers the concept of Bkper as we continue to make finances work for you rather than the other way around.