Nikolaj Mostovoy – 16 years entrepreneurial experience, 3 years doing business in Poland.
He is engaged in construction, retail and provision of services.
Certified financier.
Loves to help other entrepreneurs become more efficient and orderly with money.

Intelligent System, Warsaw – Nikolaj’s consultancy company that helps entrepreneurs with strategic planning, creation of financial models, pricing, marketing and everything else a business needs to grow. They also help companies from Ukraine to enter the Polish market.

Site: https://intelligentsystem.com.pl

Given

Before setting up a consultancy company, Nikolai was in the construction business. His projects were growing, with 10 crews plus managers who ran the sites.

Each of them had separate budgets for the purchase of materials and consumables. It all had to somehow come together in one place in order for Nikolai to understand:

• how much money was taken from the customer;
• how much was spent on procurement and salaries;
• whether each project was paying for itself;
• if his inventory was accounted for.

Plus, Nikolai wanted to see his daily cash flow, track profits, and identify areas of loss.

In other words, there was a need for systematic management accounting in Nikolai’s business, so he began looking for solutions.

Task

Can such important information be entrusted simply to an accountant? In Poland, outsourced accounting companies only do bookkeeping and tax reporting. But the main disadvantage is they submit the previous month’s data until the following month. In other words, you have to wait 2-3 weeks for a report in order to understand the situation in the business.

«We required a more timely management accounting tool that would show us where we are earning profit, where we are losing money, and where we could operate more efficiently», — says Nikolai.

Another option was to hire a financial director. However, in Warsaw, the salary of such a specialist starts at 8,000 PLN (about 2,000 €) a month.

Finmap could implement management accounting at a much lower cost. Nikolai identified the following objectives:

• Find a simple solution so that even someone without an accounting or economics background could use the system, and project managers, foremen, or drivers could deal with procurements.
• Keep all the management accounting in one place.

Previously, Mikolaj used a Polish accounting service. However, they could only cover a single task. For example, drawing up estimates, reporting cash inflows and outflows, or profit and loss (P&L report). Everything was in Excel, which was difficult to use and took too much time. In addition, there was not enough capacity to solve all the tasks.

• It was imperative that the service had a payment calendar.

Nikolai wanted to plan finances for the month ahead and beyond, and also anticipate cash gaps in order to avoid them.

• Select a multilingual solution.

The team includes people from Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus and Poland. So, Polish services alone were not suitable, since not all employees know Polish. Therefore, he needed a service where he could choose from a variety of languages.

Finmap solution

Looking for a suitable option, Nikolai came across the Finmap website and registered to give it a try.

First step

To begin with, as a certified financier, he turned to his financial model. He organized his income and cost structure. He systematized the information about where his business money was, which departments and team members had it, and which clients owed it. Than he transferred all the information to Finmap.

Nikolai gave access to project managers, foremen and the drivers who make the purchases, because Finmap has the ability to restrict access and select which information an employee can add, which can only be viewed, and which is available only to the company owner.

After that, all transactions were added through 3 simple buttons: Income, Expenditure and Transfer. System accounting had started.

Stop losing money

It was not uncommon in Nikolai’s construction business for employees to lose receipts after purchasing materials or consumables. As a result, customers would not reimburse these costs and the company had to bear them. Thousands of euros were lost in this way.

«There was a situation in September when an employee lost an invoice for 4,500 PLN (about 1,000 €) and simply forgot it. When we submitted the documents to the accountants for settlement, it turned out that the invoice was missing. Consequently, we wouldn’t have calculated the 4500 and we would have lost the money. It’s a good thing he ran it all by Finmap».

Seeing on the report that there has been such an expense, you can simply go to the shop and recover the receipt to provide to the customer. Nikolai points out that they would have lost more than the cost of their Finmap subscription with these situations alone.

Important reports

As one of Nikolai’s tasks was to control cash flow on a daily basis, he regularly analyzes «the Cash/Cash flow» report*.

* «The Cash» report in Finmap shows cash flow and allows you to see which amounts are being received and which are being spent by the company.

The Payment Calendar* has also proven to be very useful. Thanks to it, the risk of a cash gap is now visible in advance and there is time to correct the situation. In general, it is very convenient to plan all payments in advance. It helps to budget for the next month and beyond to predict the future of the business.

* In the Finmap Payment Calendar, you can see balances and money movements for any date. This includes payments planned for the future. If you add future expenses or receipts, the Payment Calendar will show whether there is enough money or if there is a risk of a cash gap.

Force majeure

From time to time, there have been some force majeure, or unforeseeable, situations. Someone with ownership status* accidentally deleted the company’s Finmap profile. A huge amount of data seemed to have been lost. Nikolai quickly contacted the care service and our managers pulled the archive with the vital information from the cloud. Everything except the transactions from the last 2-3 days before the deletion was saved there. These were retrieved and the records were restored.

* No one on the Finmap team has access to our users’ data. Therefore, there is no risk that any of the managers could delete the company or any of the data.

The result is

✅ Nikolai now has systematic financial accounting for several companies.

✅ It is easy to keep track of cash turnover. Thanks to Finmap’s simplicity, Nikolai has quietly delegated this task to project managers and a driver who handles purchasing and delivery of goods. The employees enter all the transactions themselves and thus save a lot of time for the owner and managers.

✅ The payment calendar helps to avoid cash gaps. The service warns of the possibility of a shortage of money and Nikolai can plan in advance how to raise additional funds.

«The payment calendar helped us to plan our income and expenditure so that we knew whether we had a cash gap or where it might occur. We had time to react and avoid such a situation».

✅ In addition, thanks to the payment calendar, the owner always knows to whom, when and how much his or her business owes, and who owes how much to them. It helps to plan the budget for the month ahead and beyond.

✅ Nikolai’s business does not now lose money due to mishandled receipts. Even if a receipt is lost after purchasing materials for a client’s site, the amount spent has already been entered into Finmap. This means it will not be forgotten and can be easily confirmed to the customer by simply restoring the receipt.

In addition, customers like this kind of systematic accounting. They can see how much was spent on their project and where exactly the money went. This adds credibility to the company.

✅ Businesses save money on the services of a CFO:

«At the level where we operate, we should have hired someone to handle the finances a long time ago. But with the Finmap service there is no need for that yet,» says Nikolai.

✅ One of Nikolai’s companies, which has implemented Finmap for fintech, has grown by 400% in one year. And last year, even despite the pandemic, there was ~150% growth.

«In particular it is a credit to Finmap, because even in difficult times we understood how much money we had, what we could count on, what we could buy and so on.».

P.S.
– Why did you decide to implement Finmap in your business?
– Because it is cool

To implement systematic cash flow management and see the full picture of your business at any time, connect Finmap at the link:

Try Finmap for free

14 days free. Our care service will help you find a deep solution and use maximum service opportunities for your company.

And to find out more about Intelligent System’s consultancy services, click here: https://intelligentsystem.com.pl