Flextab Blog
Stories, guides, and musings about the future of money. Brought to you by the Flextab team.

Most accounting systems connect a single entry (representing a product, service, etc) to a single corresponding payment. You bought your friend dinner for $42.50; your friend transferred $42.50 to your account. The entry is settled.

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Invoices are at the heart of most business relationships. Sending a client a summary of services, goods, hours or anything else is so commonplace, it seems indispensible. Yet invoicing is a convention, not a necessity. Perhaps it served its orginal purpose for one-time services or transactions, but...

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For many reasons, you may not know the exact amount of a transaction. Perhaps it takes place in the future. Perhaps there’s another party involved who is responsible for calculating it. Perhaps your phone died or you simply forgot. In Flextab, you can log a transaction whether you know the amount...

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Your friend has offered to pay you $100 for helping her move into her new home, as well as to pay you back for several the cost of the U-Haul truck, gas, and a few other things. You’re a really nice friend.

If you’re like most people, you’re probably not going to bother writing up an Agreement before helping your friend. Agreements take a long time to draft up and are thus only used when the stakes are really high.

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If shared ledgers are such a good idea, why isn’t the world doing it this way?

Because it wasn’t possible in the past.

A ledger between two parties contains information that is shared between them. In the pre-internet dawn age, either one party had to trust the other (a bank customer might trust a bank) or each side had to keep their own accounting of what they received and what they sent, be that money or goods or services. Discrepancies between these two copies of the information would often be found later, at a time when nobody remembers the details any more.

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Cryptocurrencies and the way they are handled can be seen as a very extreme case of payments being final - they literally are, by design. Always. No room for correcting errors - again, by design.

We think this is a key reason why they haven’t caught on for everyday transactions. There is too much focus on the rigor and security required for large irreversible transactions between anonymous potential thieves.

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Financial institutions and their regulations create complexity that isn’t needed with small, local transactions.

Financial transactions are becoming increasingly regulated–often for good reason. Regulations help prevent terrorism, arms dealing, corruption, and the invasion of your privacy. This trend is most apparent in international transactions, which are becoming more and more common between both trusted and untrusted parties.

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PayPal, Venmo, WeChat, Zelle, Apple Pay. We are inundated with payment apps. When it comes to settling up, their philosophy is “the sooner, the better.” The are the obvious solution when we need to make a quick and often one-time transfer of payment. However, not all of our transactions are so final...

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Financial tools are so currency-focused that it makes it difficult to track grassroots exchanges between friends and neighbors. Yet throughout most of human history, trusted parties exchanged goods and services in a much more organic way. Sometimes that meant the transferance of cash; othertimes, goods (e.g. borrowing a proverbial cup of sugar from the neighbor), or even something less tangible like favors and services.

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