The “regrouping” method may work well in arithmetic classes at school, it won’t however hit the mark in cash flow management: the system would otherwise topple faster than Cinderella’s carriage turned into a pumpkin. But how can you see the profitability* of each business direction separately, if you manage all business cash flow simultaneously in one place? How not to get confused in a huge number of payments and understand what refers to what, if you do not keep it all in mind?

* Profitability — the ratio of profit to turnover (all funds received from business customers for goods/products/services). Profitability shows whether the business is working effectively and how profitable it is to run it. It is calculated for a certain period (month, quarter, year) as a percentage.

Finmap can offer a solution that not only gives you a complete overview of a business’s finances, but also allows you to share data when needed. How does it work? We’ll look into it in depth in a moment.

Context

The company “Concrete Progress”* works in the construction industry. It sells building materials and also carries out repair and construction work. Each of these areas has its own clients, contracts and payments. The finances of the company, however, are in complete shambles. In order to restore them, David Fisher, head of the company, decided to use Finmap.

*The name of the company “Concrete Progress”, as well as the name of its head, are fictitious so as to protect user privacy. The situation described in this particular case however, is real.

Task

When signing up with Finmap, the head of Concrete Progress clearly knew what he needed. He wanted to be able to:

✅ View the profitability of each business area separately, so reports could be opened for specific areas only, such as “Construction” in order to understand its income and expenses, as well as its margin and how profitable engaging in a construction project would be.

✅ Visualize the data of each client. For example, in its “Construction” area, the company has 3 clients: Smith, Jones and Brown. David Fisher wanted to understand how profitable it is for the company to work with each of them.

✅ See what is happening in the business as a whole, so that analytics can be performed for all areas in order to get a global understanding of the company’s activities.

✅ Differentiate and hide, should he want to, one or several of the Construction accounts. Ideally, all accounts would need to be viewed if necessary, but then hidden so that this account is not displayed in the big picture and balances.

Finmap Solution

Of course, designing the solution involved solving several challenges. But for Finmap’s care team, this was as easy as pie.

First of all, David Fisher was offered the use of the feature set of Projects* so that the different business areas could be differentiated. The following projects were created for “Concrete Progress” company: Construction, Sale of materials, Repair.

David Fisher was now able to visualize the data and evaluate the profitability for each business area.

* Finmap users can create individual business areas as “Projects” so that the net earnings, profitability and margin rate of each project can be visualized in separate reports. This solution is convenient for users managing several areas at once within the same company, such as Concrete Progress.

Furthermore, in order for David Fisher to view the data from different clients, such as all income and expenses for Smith’s construction, for instance, we suggested using the tagging feature. The tag with the customer’s last name would now identify each payment made by said customer as well as each expense spent on him.

For example, there were 3 incoming payments in the “Construction” project and 5 outgoing payments in the same project for one single day. By adding a tag to each income and expense, the manager was able to filter the information in Analytics and thus evaluate the profitability of each client.

In order to collect all the data and obtain a global activity overview, you simply need to go to the desired report in the Finmap Analytics. David Fisher could thus visualize all the information and assess what was going on in his business.

This is especially useful if the data is entered by several different employees. No more need to walk around departments asking everyone for their own report. All you need to do is open Finmap Analytics, where all the data about the company’s finances can be visualized in the form of graphs and charts.

In order to extract one of the construction accounts from the big picture and balances, we suggested creating a separate account, called “Construction box office” on the accounts tab.

This account can remain hidden whenever you want, so that its details are not displayed in the big picture on the accounts tab. If necessary, however, the “Construction box office” account can be pulled back and viewed.

What were the results?

✅ The Concrete Progress company managed to establish a consistent cash flow management in all areas of business.

✅ With the implementation of the Projects feature set, the manager could now not only see the big picture of the business, but also the data on the profitability of each distinct area.

✅ Using tags to mark each client made it possible to analyze the data of each individual client. David Fisher now understands who brings the most money to the company, and with whom he should renegotiate or even terminate contracts that are no longer lucrative for “Concrete Progress”.

✅ Separate accounts for each asset were created, containing information that doesn’t necessarily need to be viewed all the time. This data can remain hidden so that it is not taken into consideration in the total balances. When necessary, the data can be restored and viewed at will.

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

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