The Pulse Story
We created Pulse out of a real need that we had as a small business to better understand our cash flow position and make smarter decisions concerning our day-to-day business.
Pulse was first developed in October 2007 by Clear Function, LLC, a small web design and development company. The initial application was developed and launched within that one month time frame, and the process was documented on the website, onemonthapp.com (now inactive). At that time, and for the next 19 months, Pulse remained a completely free app and mostly unchanged. On May 10, 2009, Pulse 2.0 was launched with many new features such as expanded cash flow views, reports, SSL security and file storage.
In October of 2009, Pulseapp.com, Inc. was established to help better facilitate the future growth and direction of the Pulse service. This, however, was mainly a name/organizational change with Pulse still being owned and managed by the same people who originally developed Pulse in 2007.
Why We Decided to Make Pulse
We created Pulse out of a real need that we had as a small business. With any business it is important to know what your upcoming financial situation looks like. This information helps you plan, make decisions and change course if necessary. While our existing accounting tool allowed us to enter our income, expenses and invoices and view reports accordingly, they didn't really handle the forecasting portion well. They certainly didn't let us add speculative plans to see how it would affect our cash flow down the line. For this purpose we generated a spreadsheet and shared it using Google Docs. This worked well enough, but it certainly didn't have many features, and it was hard to stay on top of as the months rolled on. In most cases it was better to just start the spreadsheet over. These factors lead to the idea and development of Pulse. Since launching Pulse initially, we have found our situation is not uncommon among freelancers and small businesses.
As opposed to more traditional accounting solutions that put the primary focus on the “register”, Pulse places emphasis on understanding one’s cash position at any time, past or future. We believe Pulse empowers businesses to make decisions. While other accounting tools let you track your financials, they don't give the ability to make the tough day-to-day decisions that happen when running a small business.