About Us

Tools should adapt to the user, not the other way around.

"Without good liquidity planning, you're constantly firefighting. Good liquidity planning is like fire prevention."

That was still manageable by gut feeling. With a handful of customers and projects, it's not a problem. If necessary, you keep a bit more money in the account so you don't run into a shortfall.

Then things got more complicated: more customers, more employees & freelancers, many projects. I quickly had to manage many transactions and volatility increased: advance payments from customers, salaries/payments to freelancers and suppliers, recurring payments for design tools, project management, etc.

With project-driven business models, you often pay upfront. You need to map this very precisely in your liquidity forecast. So I built myself an Excel spreadsheet. One sheet for each year. Months from left to right at the top, income below, expenses below that, and the total at the bottom.

Marcus Smolarek

Founder of finban

"The effort to keep the spreadsheet up to date kept growing."

I wanted to map different statuses (Open, Invoiced, ...) and scenarios (Likely, Speculative, ...) and integrated color coding with Excel scripts. The system grew and grew, becoming more complicated. The scripts needed maintenance. The more transactions to map, the slower the spreadsheet became.

But there was no solution on the market that combined the advantages of my Excel spreadsheet (focus on important transactions, all scenarios at a glance, etc.) with the benefits of a SaaS application (daily updates via bank API, etc.).

So we developed a prototype. The rest is history. Excel is a great tool, but for my liquidity planning I now only use finban.

I believe that the best digital solutions emerge at the intersection of business strategy, available technology, and the actual needs of users.

Things can become very complex very quickly, and a pragmatic, synthetic and clear vision is essential to create something that will actually be used. Emotions also play a big role, and developing a clear and beautiful aesthetic is of utmost importance to create a pleasant environment where users enjoy spending time. After all, we all have a preference for beautiful things that simply work.

With finban, 20 years of agency experience culminates in a product that we need and use for our agency work, and into which we've poured all our knowledge and love.

Maybe finban can also support you with liquidity planning?