From Handwritten Ledgers to a 54 Million UAH Business: The ThinkGlobal Story

Challenge

Yana Moskovchenko didn't set out to build a business empire — she started with a mother's search for a school that wouldn't "break" her daughter's spirit the way she felt the state system had. That search led her to buy the ThinkGlobal private school franchise in 2017, alongside an early-childhood center that later became the KUKU Kids kindergarten, plus a series of GLOBAL FRIENDS family camps.

For years, she ran the finances the way many founders do at first: by hand. Journals recorded how much came in and went out at each location, and Moskovchenko had to reconcile the numbers herself — and they often didn't match. Until she physically visited a location or called someone there, she had no idea how much money was actually sitting in the cash register. She describes constantly trying to hold it all in her head: where did we forget to record something, why is there a shortage, why doesn't it match Excel. "It was a nightmare," she says. "I don't even want to remember it."

The uncertainty came to a head at the start of the full-scale invasion, when Moskovchenko considered selling the school out of concern over instability — before realizing that trying to sell a business tracked on nothing but an Excel sheet was, in her words, unprofessional.

Solution

Moskovchenko heard about Finmap at a conference and implemented it across the business. The rollout wasn't instant buy-in — her team initially resisted, the way most teams resist any new system. She pushed it through with a simple pitch: nobody wants to wash clothes by hand anymore, and this was the equivalent of installing a dishwasher for the school's finances. Finmap's team ran an onboarding session for her staff, and within a month the same employees who'd resisted were telling her, "How did we live before?"

Today, Moskovchenko runs two school locations and a kindergarten, each with its own administrator and cash register, categorizing payments inside Finmap. She can check the balance of any register at any moment, and tracks the GLOBAL FRIENDS camps as a separate project so she can see exactly how much can go toward advertising versus how much is net profit. When she sets tuition for the next year, she now sets it based on real financial data from Finmap rather than guesswork.

Results

The clearest result is visibility. Moskovchenko says that with Finmap she can be in another city, open her phone, and see the real state of the business — a two-minute check instead of a reconciliation nightmare. Preparing for a recent interview, she pulled up the numbers in the app in a couple of minutes: annual revenue of about 54 million UAH (roughly $1,272,770), with profitability of approximately 46% for the schools and around 14% for the kindergarten.

She's since become an advocate for treating financial tracking as a business fundamental rather than a chore, telling other founders entering education to calculate their financial model before they start, not after. As she puts it, the cost of the tool is nothing next to the hours of manual work it replaced — and the freedom it has bought her, in her words, to focus "on love, on growth, on the opportunity to taste this universe."