Bogdan Puzansky is Chief Financial Officer

• Handles all financial matters in Anita Solovey’s businesses
• Uses Finmap for record-keeping
• Loves order in finances and anticipating Anita’s creative ideas

The businesses in question in the case study:

• Instagram of apartment rental company Be My Guest: @bemyguest.kyiv
• Instagram of Live.Here.Hotel: @live.here.hotel
• Orange Blogger’s Way Online Camp
• Anita Soloway’s blog: @anita_solovei

Is it possible to run several completely different lines of business at once within the same business? Why not? Entrepreneurs often are burning with new ideas and definitely want to implement them. Rent by the day? Ok. Hotel? Sure. Launch an online course? Absolutely. What about a personal blog? I want to.

How does a CFO feel about it? We asked Bogdan Puzansky, who has to keep order in the finances and to prevent the chaos in Anita Solovey’s business. How he copes with this and how Finmap helps him, we tell you in this case study.

Case

The business has several diverse ventures, both offline (renting real estate and a mini-hotel) and online (Anita’s training programs and Instagram blog). The financial director, Bogdan, is the one who needs to juggle this consortium of financial responsibilities.

At the start, systematic cash flow management was kept with the help of Google spreadsheets. Prior to the pandemic, the scale of the rental property alone was large, with 60 apartments rented daily. This generated not only a great many daily receipts, but also ongoing expenses for upkeep. In addition, expenses were often deducted from personal cards and wallets, making it difficult to account for everything.

In addition, the number of daily rentals has dropped because of the pandemic, requiring a shift to the blogging and infoproducts aspects of the company. Keeping track of the many revenue streams generated by the company’s various divisions and 20 employees meant that cash flow had to be systematized.

Task

“Excel was handy until we had several divisions and multiple revenue streams.”

With the company spread in several directions financially, there was a need to simplify the process. Maintaining Google spreadsheets was simply too complicated and was just taking up too much time. Plus, the large amount of data made it difficult to understand what was going on in the business in general. That is why Bogdan launches Finmap, requesting that we:

1. Systematize accounting so he could see both the overall picture of the business, as well as data for each area separately.
2. Make it easier to keep records in a more timely manner.
3. Create interactive visual interfaces to support analytical reasoning, so that at any moment he could quickly and easily understand the financial picture of the business, without wasting a lot of time trying to decode endless spreadsheets.

Finmap solution

“The cool thing about Finmap is that you can easily create multiple projects and keep a different record for each project.”

Bogdan immediately decided not to create several companies in the service, but to keep records in one, dividing it into Projects*. After all, even though there are several divisions, it is still one company. There is one general account in the bank, from which the money is distributed to various areas. That is why it was more convenient to create several projects within one company to see

• how much money the business has in total;
• how the financial flows are distributed;
• which areas are working well and which are not.

* Finmap users can enter individual lines of business or clients as “Projects,” and then see the profit, profitability and margin of each project separately in the report.

When we first implemented Finmap 1.0, we made every apartment in the rental business a separate project. We ended up with as many as 70 projects. On the one hand, it helped to see the profitability of each apartment.

“It was cool to see the rise or fall of this or that project. We could figure out, for example, which apartment to give up because it was bringing us more expenses than profits.

On the other hand, so many projects made cash flow management difficult. After all, expenses, such as towels, linen, and cleaning supplies, were generally calculated for the entire apartment complex, which then had to be divided among 70 projects.

The first implementation of Finmap gave Bogdan too much information and was overly complicated. I liked the detail Finmap provided, Bogdan told us, but I was trying to get away from the complexity of Excel spreadsheets.

Implementing Finmap 2.0

We noticed that with the ongoing pandemic, more apartments were being rented on a long-term basis, with fewer daily rentals. We suggested to Bogdan and Anita that the 70 apartments be treated as a single project, especially since so many of them had shifted to long-term leases, meaning that the information changed very little from month-to-month. For more individualized data, we suggested they use the Finmap Tags feature.

Using the Analytics feature, Bogdan and Anita realized that their other 6 projects (divisions), such as educational courses and blogs were generating more revenue, so they redirected investment to these areas.

Bogdan also makes extensive use of the Category* function. “We made our own categories and can now see the whole picture on one screen, without having to click through page after page in Excel,” he says.

It’s especially handy for keeping track of expenses. Like most businesses, they have both fixed costs (e.g. salaries, paying for services to work) and variable costs (e.g. renting a studio for a shoot).

* Categories in Finmap allow the user to designate income and expense types. This helps to keep track of income and expenses in each specific type. For example, to see how much of a month’s spending was on photography for a blog.

It’s very handy to mark them by category and keep track of how much money is being spent and where. Plus, it helps to see how some variable expenses become permanent, so you can plan for them in the future in the Payment Calendar*.

* In the Payment Calendar, you can have income and expenses scheduled in advance. Also, if you add future expenses or receipts, the Payment Calendar will show if there is enough money or if there is a risk of a cash gap.

Financing tips from Bogdan

Enter information every day. But if you can’t, at least record it in your notes*, otherwise, you will forget everything, even by the evening of the same day. Also, remember, Finmap allows you to delegate data entry to your employees, with restrictions and limitations set by you.

* And even better – use Telegram-bot from Finmap to enter all transactions directly from your phone at any convenient time.

• Connect accounts and cards in Finmap so that transactions are entered automatically.

• If you have multiple projects or destinations, but have the same employees, it’s better to take salaries out of projects and make them a separate expense category. For example, if you have a hotel, a blog, and a course, but the same social media promoter handles all of it

• If you don’t do this, it is difficult to divide each paycheck across all projects. Also, tying it to one area is wrong, because then one project would incur costs for all of them

• Don’t hesitate to contact Finmap care.

“I compare it to Monobank tech support. You write and they answer you quickly, as quickly as an automated system, but you get real people! “

Result

✅ The accounting of money in all 7 projects of Anita Solovey’s multifaceted business is now systematized, with all data in one place. It is convenient to see both information about the financial condition of the whole business and separately for each project.

“When there was only one rental property, we knew that all receipts and expenses went in one direction. When the hotel came along, we thought about separating the financial flows and accounting. When we developed our online services, such as a blog and educational services, we also created separate areas. Keeping all these entities separate in Excel was a nightmare, but Finmap became our salvation.”

✅ At any time Bogdan can now check how much money is available in the company accounts and cards. He does not have to separately log in to each bank’s personal accounts to do this. Plus, it is immediately clear exactly how much money is on the card of the business. This is especially convenient when there are cards that are both for business and personal needs.

✅ Now Bogdan and Anita know exactly what expenses the business can afford. Finmap has information about planned expenses, as well as data on how much money is currently in the accounts, up to the minute. This makes it so easy to estimate what the balances will be at the end of the month and how much they can spend.

✅ Businesses have also begun to take into account minor expenses, such as bank fees. Previously this was not done because the amounts were insignificant. However, they add up to a big expense in a month, and even more so in a year.

✅ There is no need to make reports, Finmap does the analysis itself. Now anyone who needs it can come in and see the whole picture of the company. And thanks to the clarity of the reports, even those who are not particularly versed in finances understand what is going on in the business.

✅ Cashflow managment has become easier. Less time is now spent on entering information and analyzing it.

Anita, our owner, is a Big Idea person. With our current cash flow system, we now know if we have the resources on hand to turn those creative ideas into reality,” Bogdan recently told us. Whatever amazing new ideas Anita comes up with, Finmap will help keep her finances in order.

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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