How SITNIKS CRM Turned Financial Chaos Into Its First Investment
“After implementing Finmap, we attracted our first investment.”
— Artem Sitnikov, CEO & Co-founder of SITNIKS CRM
Challenge
SITNIKS CRM builds customer relationship management software for small and medium-sized businesses in Ukraine. Like many growing SaaS companies, it started out tracking its finances the way most startups do: in custom-built Excel spreadsheets.
Founder Artem Sitnikov quickly ran into the limits of that approach. Spreadsheets needed constant updating, a single broken formula could throw off an entire report, and access was all-or-nothing — employees could see everything or nothing at all. Worse, there was no way to track who had changed what, so numbers could quietly stop meaning anything.
For a company hoping to raise outside capital, that gap mattered even more: investors expect clear, credible numbers, and Sitnikov needed a system that could produce them on demand. He set out to find a financial management system that would cut the time spent on bookkeeping, remove manual data entry, automate reporting, and produce numbers transparent enough to show investors.
Solution
SITNIKS CRM moved its financial management onto Finmap. One early concern was security: connecting company bank accounts to a third-party tool felt risky. In practice, Finmap works as an aggregator rather than a custodian — money stays in the company's own banks (the team uses providers including Wise and Santander), and Finmap simply pulls in the transaction data to automate calculations and reporting.
With banking integrations and automation rules in place, day-to-day data entry and processing now need only minimal intervention from Sitnikov or his managers. Flexible access settings let him delegate financial management to employees without losing oversight, freeing him to focus on scaling the business and courting investors.
The centerpiece of the setup is Finmap's Profit and Loss report, which Sitnikov calls "Finmap gold" — it consolidates results by category, contractor, and project, with filtering that lets him drill into individual metrics while keeping the report itself simple to read. Alongside it, the Cash Flow report now generates automatically from the collected transaction data. SITNIKS CRM also started using a dedicated accounts-receivable report to spot clients who were paying late in a given month, so the team could follow up before it turned into a cash-flow problem.
Results
The financial routine that used to eat Sitnikov's time is now largely automated, and the company's numbers are organized well enough to hand to outside parties on demand. Potential and existing investors can see the company's financial flows, expenses, and future obligations whenever they want, which Sitnikov says builds the kind of trust that makes negotiations more convincing. Receivables now come in more predictably, which has helped the company avoid cash gaps.
The clearest sign of the shift, in Sitnikov's own words: after implementing Finmap, SITNIKS CRM attracted its first investment.
His advice to other founders preparing to raise money is straightforward — start using a proper financial tool as early as possible, keep reporting clear enough that investors and partners can see exactly how the business runs and how their money will be used, and use that visibility to catch problems while they're still small.
