Skyclerk: ‘If a customer needs onboarding, we did not do the feature right’

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Spicer Matthews, Founder of US accounting and bookkeeping software Skyclerk, speaks to Sunniva Kolostyak about the necessary evil of accounting, providing the right UI, and serving freelancers throughout a global pandemic.

– Who is Skyclerk?

“Skyclerk is about 10 years old and came from the need for a cloud-based accounting system as there were not really many options for it at the time. I was a real estate developer during its rise and fall in the US, and back then, we built a lot of internal software so our project managers could do real-time accounting while in the field. When the real estate market crashed, we thought ‘let’s clean up this software and offer it to the world as a SaaS product’.

“Skyclerk has had many different iterations, and we are today focussed on freelancers. We got rid of all the stuff that freelancers do not care about, like balance sheet, they are not tracking assets, they do not have payroll or employees to manage. They are really just focusing on tracking income and expenses – incredibly simple. Most of our customers come to us after trying QuickBooks, where they are just overwhelmed, because QuickBooks gives you everything, and as a freelancer, you only need a very small subset. As a result of only focusing on that subset, we think we do the things that really matter to the freelancer better than anyone else.

“One feature that our customers love is on-the-go account receipt scanning, and we were one of the first people in the market to do it. You snap a photo of your receipt, our system scans the receipt, extracts all the data, and puts it into your ledger. That is probably the number-one feature that our customers just adore as it allows them to keep that shoebox of receipts empty by doing it in real time and move on.”

– What role does user interface (UI) design play in encouraging customer engagement?

“UI has been our big thing from the very beginning. We’ve always prioritised having great designers on our team and we obsess over every little design feature that we do. We do not do a lot of customer onboarding – we tend to feel that if we launch a new feature and we are getting a lot of requests for onboarding and customers need our help to walk through a feature, we know we did not do the feature properly. We want the product to be as self-serve and as intuitive as possible. The big thing is, no one wants to do accounting. None of our customers love being customers. Accounting is like a necessary evil. So, we try to make our product incredibly fast – if you check out QuickBooks, LessAccounting, or any of our other competitors, just those few seconds it takes between pages to load are just aggravating. You want to get in there, make everything as fast and app-like as possible, and move on.”

– How has Covid-19 affected you and your customers, as freelancers have been marginalised during the crisis?

“That is what you’d think, but we have actually been quite lucky. We have had a lot of new customers and a lot more engagement from our customers. Most of our customers started out with a shoebox full of receipts, so what has happened during lockdown is that all of our customers have had time to do accounting. In March, when we went into lockdown, we had a huge drop-off in usage and customers, and had some cancellations. We emailed our customers and said we are here to help, and, towards the end of March and early April, it spiked right back up. I think what happened was people got used to being in lockdown and decided to make the best of that time. We had a number of new customers sign up who I think finally had the time to sit down and play with the software. And so, our usage is way up, customer acquisition is way up. Fortunately, it has been good for us, but it feels weird to have good times when the rest of the world is not having good times. There might be a downside, we are fully aware that we might see some of our customers being marginalised going into the fall, but so far so good.”

– How do you plan on addressing those concerns?

“As mentioned, accounting is not fun. You do a lot of work to get your data into your accounting system, and through our features, we try to make that work easily, but you cannot get away from it. And so, we are very aware that the more information that our customers put into our system, the harder it is to leave, even though you can export features. So, if we go into lockdown, we will reach out to our customers and work with them by for example waiving a couple of months of the subscription fees. It will be on a case-by-case basis, but basically, if you are going through a hard cash flow period and you cannot pay, we are not going to kick you out. But we are certainly hoping that that does not happen.

“We are a very small company, so our abilities are limited. But with that said, we have been around for 10 years and a lot of our customers have been with us from day one. And so, this seems like an opportunity where we can try and help in any way we can. We are a small product, we only charge $6 a month e would love to give small business loans or grants, but we are not that big. However, we have been communicating a lot with partners like Fundbox and OnDeck and pointing our customers towards them for invoice-based lending products – if you invoice people and you want to get paid early, based on that invoice, these companies will provide that.”

– What else have you got coming up in the next months?

“With the whole team in lockdown, we have got a lot done. We have new features; an integration with Plaid to use transactions from different banks, and a new, separate mobile app that we will probably launch this fall, that is completely designed for contractors such as plumbers, electricians and siders. It will still use Skyclerk as a back-end, but the mobile app will be totally geared towards them. We singled out this group of contractors because their needs are pretty unique – they are always in the field, getting back to the computer is a very big headache for a contractor. Contractors usually bid per square foot, so they will go measure, say, a wall, and give a per square foot bid for siding. And so, we provided this super mobile-friendly app that is going to allow them to bring in their construction materials, bring in the labour, all at a square foot level, and then provide an estimate. So, kind into the end of 2020 and into 2021, we’re focused on a very niche segment of our customers and trying to enhance their experience very specifically through customised apps.”