Why Finban – Marcus

"Without good liquidity planning, you are constantly putting out fires. Good liquidity planning is like fire prevention."*

*Marcus Smolarek, Founder & CEO of finban.io (LinkedIn)

Liquidity planning is indispensable for companies. In the early years, YOU still manage this somehow by gut feeling. With a handful of customers and projects, that is 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 the volatility also increased: milestone payments from my clients, salaries / payments to freelancers and suppliers, recurring payments for design tools, project management, and so on.

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

"The reconciliation to keep the spreadsheet up to date became increasingly time-consuming."

I wanted to represent different statuses (Open, Invoiced, etc.) and scenarios (Probable, Speculative, etc.) and integrated color coding with Excel scripts. The system grew and grew and became increasingly complicated. The scripts had to be maintained. The more transactions there were 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 the important transactions, all scenarios at a glance, for example) with the benefits of a SaaS application (daily updates via bank API, for example).

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 get very complex very quickly, and a pragmatic, synthesized, and clear vision is essential to create something that people will actually use. Emotions also play a big role, and developing a clear and beautiful aesthetic is of paramount importance to create a pleasant environment where the user enjoys spending time. After all, we all have a preference for beautiful things that simply work.

With finban, 20 years of agency experience culminate in a product that we need and use for our agency day-to-day, and into which we have poured all our knowledge and passion.

Perhaps finban can support you with your liquidity planning too?