DEMO: Profitably brings Fortune 500 analytics to small business

Profitably is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Profitably is dubbing itself a champion of small businesses at the DEMO conference. Why? It’s providing revenue and profit insights for those businesses, and in the process, the company’s founder said it’s “picking a fight” with corporate analysis platform-makers like SAP and Microsoft.

Traditional business intelligence and analytical platforms used by big corporations are too expensive, unwieldy and time-intensive for small businesses, even though smaller companies could benefit from the accounting and business insights those platforms provide, said Profitably CEO Adam Neary.

Profitably works with Intuit’s Workplace, a collection of apps that manages, among other things, expense tracking, documents and accounting. The company’s software uses Intuit to connect to a business’s QuickBooks data, then sifts through it to glean insights about inefficiencies and opportunities. The software, which Neary calls “dead simple,” doesn’t require businesses to cleanse or reorganize data in order to analyze it — it accounts for variations and idiosyncrasies in a company’s accounting practices.

Neary built his career advising Fortune 500 companies on where they were making and losing money – and realized a lot of the problems faced by big companies apply to mom-and-pop shops, too. So he started the company, which has three employees, in New York six months ago. The site’s traffic has grown since April by 65 percent per month, and Profitably has signed up over 100 clients for its beta launch.

The company has raised $325,000 to date, of which $25,000 is Neary’s personal investment. The remaining $300,000 comes from a seed round led by North Bridge Venture Partners with angel investors David Tisch, Mark Birch and David Honig.

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