Last week on the blog we took a look at how we’ve overhauled our business finance process of managing finances at Jo&Co. In that blog post I outlined what led us to alter our processes, move away from Quickbooks, and change banks – enter: Found Bank.
I mentioned that at some point I would write a review of our experience using Found, with no intention of it being anytime soon. Well, the next day Found reminded us that starting the month of June means making our 2nd Quarterly Estimated Tax payment.
Since making quarterly payments is something we do inside of Found (have I said its simplified our finances a lot yet? No? It has), it seemed like a great time to take a bunch of screenshots (soo many…) and take you along for the ride while breaking down our favorite features (✅) and areas of improvement (❌).
(Yup, I can hope Found will read my blog and take notes 😂 but really Found, if you are reading this, you’ve made a great product).
🧑💻 Dude, you just wasted like 3 paragraphs and said nothing of value.
Alright, let’s jump straight in. Before paying our June Estimated Tax Payment in Found, I make sure our Expenses and Income are all entered correctly.
🧑💻 If you’re just here for a summary, there’s one at the bottom. The middle was written for people that actually care about how the features work, since I couldn’t find one of these when I was considering Found Bank.
Expense Tracking in Found
What makes Found different than most other banks that we considered is its combined ability to track Expenses & Income and directly connect each one to an impact on your tax bill.
✅ Every time you spend money directly on your Found debit card or an ACH bank payment it can notify you of the payment, and the dollar amount that it will decrease your taxes if applied to a tax-deductible category.
✅ If you have recurring payments that you know always fall into the same business category? You can create an automatic rule as we did for Adobe – it’s categorized as ”Software & subscriptions”.
But, if you read last week’s blog, you know we’re points people (shameless plug). ❌ There’s no Found credit card or any built-in way to earn points. We put a lot of our charges on a travel credit card to earn points. ✅ However, that doesn’t matter because Found is set up to enter in non-Found expenses (and income). Simply: 1) Add Expense, 2) Choose Category, 3) Add Pertinent Details.
✅ If you don’t know what kind of expense you have there are nice simple descriptions of what each Category is. ❌ Some of the descriptions aren’t correct (eg. business lodging in this screenshot). Since we started using Found at the beginning of 2022 it feels like this has improved and they’ve added a few more categories (Found is a startup – more thoughts on that later).
✅ Found goes a step further to understand the rules of what information needs to be kept for tax purposes depending on the category AND supports keeping the pictures/information as necessary (eg. many things under $75 don’t need a receipt, however all hotels do as well as restaurants & who you were with). Also, you can see at the bottom of this screenshot it shows that this was a manual entry for us.
Income Tracking in Found
Estimated Tax Payments are estimated based on your estimated profit as a business. This makes it just as important for Found to have income tracking features as it does for expenses. For us (as I’d imagine it is for most people) there are far fewer transactions for our income, simplifying this a little. ✅ Found has the same flexibility with income as expenses of either having direct transaction/deposit or manually entering income, to give you options.
For us, we’ve chosen to have all of our Business Income paid directly into Found (think HoneyBook, Stripe, Square, etc). This enables another cool feature that Found can do automatically. ✅ Auto-Withholding money into a separate account specifically for Tax. Based on the running estimate of what our taxes will be, Found knows roughly how much we need to set aside to have the funds ready to pay our Quarterly Tax payment. If we have more than enough in the Tax account it won’t take anything out of an income deposit. If the new income means the Tax Account needs more, it’ll set aside just enough to make sure that there’s enough.
This means that every time we have an income payment we’ll get two notifications – how much was deposited and how much was auto-withheld.
❌ Found as a business bank account is designed to have exactly 2 accounts: Checking and Tax. To the best of our knowledge, you’re not able to open any other accounts and I think this is by design to keep it simple. So while it’s on our cons list, for us the benefits of Found much outweighed the limited number of accounts.
Give the Activity and Reports screen a once-over
The next step is double-checking that we have all the correct expenses and income entered in. This starts on the Activity screen where all transactions, both charged and manually entered, sit in one place. ✅ For a small business it’s helpful to be able to see everything in one place. As you start growing there will be more and more entries on the transaction page; for now, I’ve been impressed at the options for filtering specifically what I want to look at.
For example, since we’re getting ready to pay our tax estimate ✅ I’m able to filter for transactions that Found says I need something added for to make sure it has everything it needs to make an accurate estimate for us.
✅ Once all those needs are taken care of, I take a quick peek at the reporting feature. It gives a Profit & Loss statement, Income, and Expenses summary (reports is only available in the desktop web application).
Paying Taxes
This brings us back to where we started, paying the 2nd Quarterly Estimated Tax payment. Now that we’ve gotten all of our transactions squared away (in honestly not that many steps), we can click the remaining few buttons to submit our federal and state estimated tax payments.
✅ Since the idea of Tax is built into all the separate parts of Found, it’s no surprise that they have a dedicated page that gives you a summary of what’s in your Tax Account and a breakdown of how they’re estimating your Tax Payment. It’s really helpful to see in one place a comparison of how much you have set aside along with a breakdown of how the current estimate is calculated.
As soon as a new quarter begins it adds a button to directly pay your quarterly taxes (the arrow top right gives the breakdown; I was too excited to pay and forgot to take a screenshot 🤷♂️).
✅ Once you go to “Make a payment”, it gives you a quick summary and lets you directly pay Federal from Found. For Indiana, it sends us to Indiana’s website to make a payment. ❌ To be honest I think they have an old link for Indiana since Indiana may have recently changed their online portal to pay Estimated Tax Payments.
That brings us to the end of our process in balancing our monthly transactions in Found and paying Quarterly Estimated Tax payments – which brings us to the question:
Would we recommend Found?
How we use Found has simplified our process of managing finances and keeping up with all of our expenses consistently.
Is it for everyone? No. Found is a really good bank for people with a side hustle or a small to medium business. If we were in charge of finances for a business with 50 people and doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in transactions each month, this would not be our first choice. But that’s why we love Found; they designed their bank & product with business owners like us in mind. We’re not one of many user types, we’re one-of-one. Most traditional banks weren’t set up with us in mind *ahem* looking at you big chain brick and mortar banks.
There’s a lot of features that we didn’t even touch on that would be amazing if we didn’t already have a CRM or payment processing system. For instance, they have a built out Invoicing and Payment functionality that we’ve never used. If you didn’t have anything else this would be a great place to start.
One thing that is important to note is that Found Bank is a Tech Startup. In Feburary 2022 they closed a Series B round of funding for $60 million compared to their $12.75 m Series A in May 2021 or $1.15 m in Oct 2020. They’re growing pretty rapidly and we’ve even seen changes being made in the 5 months we’ve been users (we’re pretty sure they added the payment functionality).
TL;DR (here’s to you skimmers out there 🥂)
In the pro column: Found has really good features for tracking Expenses both directly charged and manually entered. They’ll tell you what documentation and details you need to keep for each expense based on dollar amount and category. Income works smoothly and, if desired, will withhold Tax into a separate account based on your running Profit and Loss that Found calculates for you. They remind you and seamlessly help you pay both your federal and state Quarterly Estimated Tax Payments.
In the con column: Found is a tech startup and they’re rapidly developing. This means that not all the features are polished yet (ie: category descriptions) and some features don’t exist yet (ie: multiple checking accounts). However, all of this is probably coming as they’re starting to scale and add more stability and features. They’re still missing some exporting of transactions features & I don’t think you’re able to share access with a CPA other than just giving them your login credentials. And I haven’t been able to find any feature release notes/documentation in their support docs of what new features are being added and when.
Basically, if you: want a simple single location to manage your business banking, expenses and tax; you’re a small to medium business; and you don’t mind working with a tech startup that cares about making the best product for you (yes, they asked in a survey); Found would most likely be a great fit for you.
If you’ve gotten this far and have a question we haven’t answered in depth, drop a comment below or dm us on Instagram @joelleelizabethandco – we’d love to chat!
And if you are interested in signing up for Found after this, we’d appreciate it if you use our Affiliate link. You’ll also get $20 back once you spend $100 in the first 30 days (*sigh* maybe one day Found will sponsor us…).
Comments +