Financial Planning Software with Advisor for Small Business Owners

Online financial planning and forecasting software is a great option for any business that wishes to manage their budgets in a streamlined and organized way.  However, financial planning and accounting would make even the bravest entrepreneur go weak in his heart, considering how complex, cumbersome and critical accounting can be. Keeping this in mind, we bring you Financial Planner,  the next generation tool that does not require specialized training, meaning that it’s easy-to-use.

The system has an option for cooperating with a financial advisor. It’s highly efficient, fast, automated, and has all the answers to your questions, simple like where your money went, how much you have earned and will earn in a few months, and advanced like when you will be able to buy a car and whether your business is profitable, etc.

Challenges of Financial Planning and Forecasting Software

The finance management system had to serve both the personal as well as small business owner’s needs. The software was named  Finance Planner as the planning was the primary task that had to be dealt with. However, the biggest development challenge was to provide predictive analysis of the financial status.

Data is essential for analysis and planning,  so the financial planning and forecasting tool has some exciting features to simplify the process of collecting it.

Let’s take a closer look at Elastic Transaction. This sort of transaction is useful when a single payment is made for several purposes. For instance, if an invoice for hardware and software is paid as a single payment, the elastic transaction will tell:

•        How much was paid from client’s account
•        How much of the cost was allocated to hardware and how much is to software.

Creating this feature has required out-of-the-box thinking. To implement Elastic Transactions the development team created a new in-memory database in JavaScript that works on client’s side to serve the transactions list form.

It operates with a big number of three-dimensional data records, and is written in pure JavaScript (ECMA Script 5, object-oriented style) and has been developed as three-layer app (presentation layer (html, css); business layer; data layer.

The latter is responsible for lazy data loading from the cloud and syncing the updates to the server.

In the case of sync failure (concurrency, connectivity etc.), the in-memory-database rolls the changes back, and the updated values will be reverted, like in traditional databases.

Development process and methodology

The team uses SCRUM combined with Kanban. Now the project is in post-production,  maintenance/support stage. Kanban suits better in such cases. For periods of intensive development, SCRUM was used with two-three weeks iterations.

The server-side code is fully covered with unit and integration tests that guard systems stability and sustainability.

Main Features of Financial Planning Software

Most online financial budgeting tools can only provide the information on the basic financial questions about your spendings and earnings. Finance Planner does that and much more, which is why it can be used by small businesses and professional financial advisors with its rich features:

• Elastic Transactions
• Transaction Templates
  if a client frequently makes the same payments, he or she can create a custom template to save time on entering the same details every time.
• Automatic Currency Rates Control (integration with Google Currencies)
  Single-currency payments are always balanced (the amounts in debit equals credit). In the case of multi-currency transactions, the actual exchange rate depends on many factors. It is impossible to get the absolute balance, so the Finance Planner accepts slightly unbalanced transactions and will deny transactions with unbalance factor exceeding the predefined limit.
• Financial schedules (recurring payments scheduled on daily/weekly/monthly/annual basis)
• Personal loans tracking
• Bank Credits
  Supports of most popular credit algorithms with plenty of configuration options
• Automatic Budgeting
  Data analysis of the past cash flow periods and automatic approximation of the future ones.
• Financial Forecast. Predictive analysis
  Predict client’s financial status. Answers questions like how much money you will have in NN months, when you can buy a new car/house, etc.
• Financial Project Planning, predictive analysis
  The sub-planning feature enables collecting finance instruments (credits, schedules, transactions) into sets and work with such collections as with sub-budgets. Predictive analysis works here as well and can answer questions such as “will my project be profitable?”, “is it worth to take a bank credit to start a new business/branch?” etc.
• History Analysis (see how much, on what and when the money was spent)
  Report for the past periods. Answers questions about your spendings.
• Warehouse management and Purchase List
  Inventory management module tracks goods and consumables. It automatically generates lists of purchases for things running out of stock. Purchase List can be opened on mobile apps when shopping.
• СRM module
• Invoices – generate and submit invoices
• The financial planning and budgeting software allows to generate invoices in PDF format and submit them to the customers by email.
• Automatic VAT calculation and payment
  It allows calculating Vatable incomes for the past months and  making automatic VAT payments
• Google and Facebook  single sign-on
• Finance Advisory – cooperation with professional finance advisers
  Finance Planner was designed and developed together with professional financial advisors. And now clients can subscribe to advisory services, choose an advisor, and the professionals will take care of the finances.
• Flexible and configurable tariff plans to manage personal / business finances
  This feature enables creating/configuring tariff plans. The administrator can select features to the tariff plans and define pricing rules.
• Finance Planner accepts payments via various payment providers and enables features the user subscribed to.
• The tariff configuration engine is resistant to human mistakes. For instance, if the administrator enables “Invoices” but disables “Inventory Management”, both will work for the users because of dependency rules.
• Integration with PayPal, Braintree, liqPay payment systems
• Account Balance Control (enables setting limits on accounts, the system notifies when the limits are violated)
• Email notifications (overdue payments, violated accounts limits, negative finance forecast)
• Multilanguage (English, German, Ukrainian, Russian)
• Integration with Community Forum Software (Website Toolbox)
• Mobile apps for iOS and Android devices

Financial Planning Software Results

The Finance Planner has already been implemented by hundreds of customers, spanning SME owners and financial advisors from USA, Canada, Australia, Philippines, Austria, Ukraine and other countries. A dozen of users already subscribed to paid tariff plans,  even though payments were integrated just a few months ago.

The company is committed to building the best business budgeting, forecasting, and financial analytics software to help make business planning easier.