Malvern’s AboutOne is Basecamp for families

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Edit: Corrected AboutOne’s rate.
Growing up in Yorkshire, England, Joanne Lang’s mother had a shoebox where she kept all of the family documents. Birth certificates, bills, pictures; it was all kept inside a shoe box tucked in a drawer somewhere. After seeing her mom’s system, Lang promised herself that when she became a mother she would figure out a better method.
Lang has combined her mother’s shoebox with her years of experience at SAP to create AboutOne, an online hub for families who need to keep track of all of their accounts, paperwork, schedules and more.
Just like businesses often rely on Basecamp to collaborate and archive materials, AboutOne performs a similar function for busy moms and dads everywhere.

“I saw business software save businesses millions for years,” she says about her long career with business software. “And my personal paperwork requirements when I had children went up a zillion.”
AboutOne is aiming to be the Swiss army knife for families offering a wide range of archiving and planning features. The site can store receipts, do taxes, save bank account information, store pictures and more. It also helps families stay in touch with family members by automatically creating an email newsletter than can sum up the family’s month to be sent to grandparents.
Parents can enter in information through AboutOne.com or use the products mobile service to email themselves information that will automatically post to their account.
Putting all of this information in one place also helps families be more efficient. For example, AboutOne can cross reference entered test scores to help high schoolers apply to the right colleges.

De-centralized

While Lang works in Malvern, the AboutOne staff is scattered throughout the country with five employees in Utah, one in California and three in Pennsylvania.
The company is bootstrapped with money from friends and family and hopes to begin its climb to profitability by charging $30 a year (though interested families can get a 15-day trial).
Just before launching the beta this month, Lang says that AboutOne has just under 1000 users. Though the company is optimistic about its future and hopes to save parents everywhere from stuffing important documents in a drawer somewhere.
“If anything happens to me, I don’t want [my children] to miss out on that shoebox,” she says.