Scred, a Finnish startup that lets friends track and manage track their shared expenses and debts, has come up with a brand new twist. With MiniCorps (as in mini-corporation) you can track income and expenses for a whole group, work out if you are making profit or loss and know how much revenue you’ve made. The MiniCorps application will also receive money and sell items online, with all of it tracked by Scred without anyone having to touch Microsoft Excel. All the cash is handled via Paypal, which seems limiting for now but at least it makes it pretty accessible. Suddenly amateur rock bands everywhere can rejoice.
So groups that use MiniCorps get simple and lightweight shops so they can immediately start selling stuff like tickets, MP3s, CDs, t-shirts, donations, memberships you name it. The application is most likely to appeal to lightweight companies like bands, film crews, artists, associations and especially virtual companies like many startups.
MiniCorps is not unlike a simpler version of another Finnish startup Fruugo (still in private beta), but simpler and pretty easy to start making and tracking money.
Scred’s focus remains on tracking people’s money as a group. In this respect their competitors include BillMonk, Buxfer, and Obopay. But they are also they are building links to external services which will then integrate with Scred (such as tickets and t-shirts and so on). They are also planning an API, an easy ticket selling system, and more complex accounting for bigger companies.
For the moment the MiniCorp functions are in beta but we have 300 invites for TechCrunch readers who can use the invite code “TC300”. Log in and go to the place for creating pools, where you can enter the code.