Benji Finance

Benji Finance helped self-employed Canadians keep track of their business expenses by auto-categorizing their bank account and credit card transactions.

The initial idea for building Benji Finance stemmed from my personal frustrations with expense tracking for all my various personal projects over the years. I had a spreadsheet I would use to keep track of all my expenses. Then, at tax time, I would go see my accountant who would then go through each tax form category line-by-line and asked me what I spent on each category. Since expense categorization is contextual based on how the item or service purchase was used, I didn't feel comfortable using CRA's T2125 tax form categories. Of course, this doesn't include expenses where I could only deduct a portion of the expense (e.g. mobile phone bill), which was another thing I needed to keep track of.

I wanted something similar to Mint, but specifically for self-employed individuals. I had tried QuickBooks Self-Employed, FreshBooks, and Wave, but they all felt more invoicing driven rather than having a sole focus on expense tracking. Unfortunately, building such a solution wouldn't be easy since Yodlee was the only transaction data aggregator at the time, and it wasn't cheap. I also didn't think expecting people to upload their statements or a spreadsheet was a great experience. So I sat on the idea for a while until I came across a BetaKit article about Plaid expanding it's services to Canada. Plaid seemed like the perfect solution to import user transactions while payment processing could be done with Stripe.

Strangely, for all of my excitement, I decided not to pursue building Benji Finance right away. A part of me wasn't sure if I was an entrepreneur or just a "wantrepreneur." It took conversation with Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale for me to recognize that all of my personal projects over the years have been a form of entrepreneurship, and that I should pursue building Benji Finance. It also helped that my partner, Katie Hulan, was extremely supportive and suggested I give it a try for six months and see what happens—even offering to cover our rent if it ever came to that. Little did either of us know that I'd be working on Benji for a lot longer than six months.

Simple Categories

During user research, whenever someone mentioned they use a spreadsheet to keep track of their expenses, we asked to see it. Overtime, we noticed that most people don’t use the same category names as the ones on the tax forms; they had more granular names (e.g. software or web hosting) for categories they used to track their expenses. We kept this in mind and developed our own “simple categories” to reflect how users categorize their expenses and reduce any likelihood of confusion or feeling overwhelmed. We then mapped our simple categories to the T2125 tax form categories behind the scenes to ensure the accurate tax reporting. Of course, in order to ensure we did this correctly, we had to learn how the Canadian tax system works and then define the criteria for all the category mapping to be implemented.

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Financial Overview

Even though Benji Finance started with the goal of helping self-employed Canadians keep track of their expense, we had a number of users who reported that the app didn't provide enough visibility into the overall financial health of their business. This led us to build a dashboard that provided users with better insights into their business finances. We focused on making it easier for users to quickly see how their business is doing (e.g. estimated profit) while feeling prepared for tax time (e.g. estimate income tax). We also used this opportunity to nudge users to stay on top of their expense tracking by highlighting which transactions needed receipts and which transactions needed to be reviewed.