BBVA is also closing Azlo, the business bank that Stripe Atlas uses (used?) for LLCs. Looks to me like BBVA is attempting to annoy as many customers as possible.
I love Simple to death. They overnighted a cashier's cheque for me, for free, on holiday. They've been nothing but kind and I truly hate to see them go. I really really loved being a Simple customer.
Simple has been my only checking account since 2011. I think I learned about them on HN. The UI is snappy and slick and their support team have always gone above and beyond. They're really the model for what a checking account should be.
I liked Simple’s UI and budgeting tools a lot, especially the “safe to spend” thing, but I don’t think running everything directly from a checking account is wise. It’s really better to have a credit card that you pay off every month, with solid fraud protection and rewards, and touch your debit card as little as possible. Simple’s snazzy software is not too useful when you do that. I ended up using a traditional checking account and YNAB.
I've used Simple since 2014 and it's easily the best banking experience I have ever had. I've spread my spending and banking activity out over different banks/services over the years, but I always use Simple as my main bank. Honestly not sure where I will move my main account over to.
So many valuable businesses have been destroyed by investors or founders seeking an early exit.
If you are an entrepreneur, think very long and hard before you accept any outside money. I have seen so many good businesses forced to sell by investors or a founder who thought they were done, only to regret it later.
They took a $117 million exit and sold their soul to Big Bank. At least Josh doesn't have to worry about budgeting money ever again for the rest of his life despite his vision of bringing this functionality to the financially challenged masses all come crashing down in flames with this announcement.
I will never remain a user of a start up that sells their soul to Big Corp because of examples like Simple and being burned in the past so many times, I'm jaded.
That's surprising to me, one time my card got blocked because I used it at (I guess?) a sketchy ATM. I called them but they had zero customer service outside of business hours. Opened up a Chase account after that.
I have a very ordinary LLC and Novo rejected my application for no obvious reason, with no details whatsoever. I don't think I have anything unusual going on, so IDK how easy they actually are to work with.
Mercury is another option but my experience has been that some of their offerings are at best misleading (I would argue they're deceptive), and they can't do normal things like export a QBX statement to reconcile into Netsuite, you have to write your own stuff from scratch using their API.
Exporting -- unless I'm missing something, it's only possible to export a CSV for transactions matching a filter. For better or worse, QBO etc formats are the standard for importing a statement to reconcile and there's extra friction each month to import a CSV.
Misleading -- Tea Room (for us) does almost nothing which was advertised:
- Treasury was marketed to be available to everyone who isn't taxed as a sole proprietor. We're a non-profit, and found out after moving all our money that we weren't eligible. I asked support to clarify this, and it looks like they've removed /all/ information about eligibility from the site which is a small improvement I guess.
- There don't seem to be any startup deals for Tea Room members. There isn't anything on the page on the site for Tea Room.
- We haven't gotten any tea. (I don't actually care about that, but come on, it's in the name.)
We moved to Mercury because Treasury would have been immensely useful to us. In all other ways BofA is /fine/ and we would not have moved if it were advertised honestly. I think it's deceptive because none of this was obvious to us before we planned out a migration and wired the $270k over to get access.
Exporting - From my understanding the CSV format matches the QB specification. Are you saying that it matching the filters is an issue or that the format is incorrect.
Treasury for nonprofits - We only just launched Treasury (in December) and nonprofits are a relatively small part of our business so this hadn't come up during our alpha. I am going to investigate why our clearing house does not support nonpfotis, and make sure the restrictions is clearly stated.
Tea Room Deals/Perks - We recently launched this https://mercury.com/perks. Did you see this already and it doesn't match what you want or did you miss it?
Tea - We were revamping the tea packaging so it might be on pause right now. But we do really ship some pretty nice tea normally :).
The other thing that you get with tea room is free domestic + international wires.
Anyway, I can see why your experience was disappointing. I really appreciate the feedback and hopefully we can improve to deliver something better in the future.
Thanks for the response. (And for anyone else watching, he also DMd me on Twitter which was nice.) I didn't realize Mercury was a startup which makes the oversights more understa
I did not see the perks, thanks for clarifying that. They are not linked on the dashboard and homepage cannot been loaded when logged in.
And to clarify we don't use Quickbooks. QBO/QBX is a specific file format which most accounting systems expect when reconciling a statement. CSVs /work/, but require you to remap the fields manually which is tedious.
Your accounting software doesn't support CSV templates? I had a similar issue with a different bank and in the reconcile feature you can pick the template (eg QBO, CSV, etc) and under CSV are the templates I made (along with stock templates for $BigBank). So I only made the template once with a little drag/drop page and was done. All subsequent imports are "one click" easy
NetSuite requires CSVs to be in a predefined format. No mapping options at all. [1]
(You might think "just don't use NetSuite" but most large companies are using NetSuite. Small-business accounting systems do not work well past a certain scale of transactions/purchasers/vendors/etc.)
Does it export in all formats likes he’s claiming it doesn’t? Can you point to documentation? Usually, and not always, when someone makes a shadiness it’s directionally hinting at someone.
We have a QB export compatible file. It's an export button on the top of our transactions page and has date, description, amount, status, bank description, reference and notes as column.
I don't think we have specific documentation of that feature, but I am happy to demo it. Our api documentation is here: mercury.com/api.
I am sure there is something specific Tyler was talking about. Would love to learn what it is so we can fix it.
I switched from Simple to USAA, and have been really happy with their customer service. Their app sucks compared to Simple, though, but that’s probably true of 100% of banking apps.
I love Simple to death. They overnighted a cashier's cheque for me, for free, on holiday. They've been nothing but kind and I truly hate to see them go. I really really loved being a Simple customer.