We have a death clock on our company dashboard. Cash on hand/burn rate/revenue are updated a couple of times a month manually. We have yet to figure out a way to get the data programmatically.
If you use something like Xero.com then you can use their API to poll for the data whenever you want (though likely daily unless you're also performing reconciliation via the API).
Last time there was noise about startup death clocks (let me find the link to the last discussion later), I thought it was a good idea but not at all what I wanted. What I wanted was to be able to plug in the actual income/outgoing for individual months/days and be able to see when the trend lines change, or choose which time frames to calculate over, and not just to determine "when will I run out of money?" but also "when will I become rich?" using the trend of the last month, six months, year, total, what have you. Not only that, but early in a startup, in/out costs can be highly variable month to month.
So I implemented some basic java scripts to record and update incoming and outgoing transactions and I realized as I was starting to put data in, that I would much rather not input all transactions but just get the data from my bank.
Then I realized that this would be much better as a plugin for a ledger/budget balancer program, or for something like mint.com. And I kind of abandoned progress on it there, as I don't use mint, and I started looking at various programs to help me track money but realized that keeping a spreadsheet of "money at start of month, money at end of month", still works fine for me, and with some macros I can determine what I want to know.
So... for some one who does use these programs, would a plugin (or just a script on exported data) be worth it? Should I learn to use mint or gnucash or whatever for this?
I posted my app here last week and lots of people liked it: https://zetabee.com/cashflow/ - I use it for my personal expenses but you should be able to use it for a small business.
If you accidentally mouse down on the page and begin selecting things (I do this habitually), Chrome will begin scrolling right, and then you're unable to scroll back without doing the same in the inverse. Weird.
Oooooooh! I get it now. According to this death-clock, my larger than small but smaller than medium company that is making very good money is a lifestyle company, like 37signals is. Actually, that's true! But do me a favor, don't tell anyone that. Please don't tell my hard-working and talented employees, for whom I am very grateful. Please don't tell my friends and siblings or my vendors. Let's just keep this between you and I. Thanks!
Haha this is hilarious! Reminds me of the death clock that was so popular forever ago - oh man, it's still alive and kicking! http://www.deathclock.com/. Wonder how much that guy made all these years.
If you type in enough 9's in the "cash on hand" slot, the "middle box" will get out of bounds. Should add some JS to make the fonts a bit smaller when there are too much symbols in the row ;)
I just amused myself by figuring out when rounding would kick in, I set the delta of cash in and cash out to 100 and put in 99.99 then just began appending 9's to the end until it switched from 'now' to 'one month' never has .000000000000009$ mattered so much.
Is this another sign that we are entering a Web 2.0 bubble? You bet it is!
37 signals is sending an awesome message to the community; one that emphasizes that you don't need millions of funding and that net income is your #1 objective as a business owner. Make more money then you spend. End of story.