Why Sai? 🤔
I’ll never forget the first time I talked to someone at the bank on my own. The imposter syndrome sunk in from the moment I stepped into the fluorescent-lit bank office. All I could think was that I didn’t want the bank salesperson to know just how much I didn’t understand… and how broke I was. So I smiled and nodded my way through a fast-paced sales pitch and signed papers that I didn’t fully comprehend, hoping I could get out of there as soon as possible.
I thought that when my dance career finally took off and I made more money, I would finally be able to take better control of my finances. However, even when the contracts started coming in and my self-employed income went up, I realized I still had no idea what I was doing.
No one taught me how to track and manage the money I made, how much to put away for taxes, or how anything worked. I felt lost and overwhelmed, deep in scarcity, and the worst part? Every tax season I would haphazardly gather the handful of receipts I had remembered to keep, try to re-teach myself Excel basics, and then feel like I was going to throw up when I saw how much money I owed the government… Money that I had definitely not saved or tucked away somewhere…
We created Sai to ensure that other artists don’t have to go through situations like this again.
Over the past two years, the Sai team has dug deep into understanding artists’ complex relationship with money. My experience was not isolated. Many of us feel like managing money is the hardest, most stressful part of our work.
Out of all the interviews and surveys conducted, a few key findings emerged:
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- Money brings up big feelings and lots of them.
- Understanding self-employed finances feels overwhelming af.
- Tax. Season. Sucks.
☁️ Money Feels
A University of Cambridge study suggests that our personal feelings around money are established as early as SEVEN years old!
Think about your money memories:
☁️ How was money talked about – or not – in your home?
☁️ What was your family’s proximity to financial privilege?
☁️ How has culture shaped your relationship to money and how it’s valued?
All of these pieces impact our present day money feels. Our experiences and the emotions connected to them get pulled up when we set our rates, make a big purchase, invest in our training, or decide if we’re going to take on a project or not.
We need to be mindful about unpacking and understanding our feelings around money, how this relationship came to be, what serves us and what hinders, so we can use money as a tool. Just one of the things we can use to take care of ourselves and each other.
📊 Biz Finance
Avoidance is a tactic many of us employ when it comes to facing our self-employed finances. We often leave it alone until tax season when we have no choice but to dive into the deep end.
It can feel so daunting to sit down and organize all your finances… for me, it brings back memories of sitting at the kitchen table trying to do my math homework. 🤢
It shouldn’t be this hard!
Artists deserve an easy-to-use, shame-free solution that breaks things down into what we need to know. A solution built for us, by us. A solution that eliminates the overwhelm, finance lingo, Excel formulas, and insights that don’t understand who we are or what we do.
Sai gives you all of what you need to know, none of what you don’t.
One of our key features is a welcoming, visual dashboard that lays out:
💰 How much money you made
💰 How much you spent on biz expenses
💰 How much tax you owe
💰 How much money is left over
Inhale. Exhale. We gotchu 💙
💸 Tax Time
Last thing. Unanimously, across the board, everyone hates tax season 😩
Do any of these statements resonate with you?
❌ I’m scared to find out how much tax I owe.
❌ I don’t understand what I can write-off… or what that even means!
❌ How do I report the grant funding I received?
❌ What if I don’t have enough money to pay what I owe?
❌ …I literally just hate dealing with this sh*t.
Yeah… us too. That’s why we’re launching with tax filing as our top priority, at no extra cost!!
Sai will organize everything for you over the course of the year. This means that when tax season rolls around, all you gotta do is file!
Expenses? Organized. Income? Calculated. Tax money? Saved!
Click, click, BOOM!🔥
