Finance and accounting automation platform LiveFlow hit the headlines in September 2024 by raising USD 13.5 million, through the Series A round, which will further help the company fund the launch of “LiveFlow Next,” a new line of reporting and analysis products, as the venture expands its go-to-market team and invests in research and development.
“The new product suite features tools for building custom client dashboards, intelligent forecasting, industry benchmarking, AI-driven transaction categorisation and more,” LiveFlow CEO Lasse Kalkar informed the media.
Established in 2021, LiveFlow’s customer base includes international accounting firms like BDO and KLR along with brands like Wendy’s and Crumbl Cookies, as the start-up claims itself to be North America’s “Number One Financial Analysis Software Trusted by Thousands of Companies.”
LiveFlow is all about the integration of AI into accounting, as bookkeeping, tax preparation and auditing involve repetitive tasks that can benefit from the technology. In addition, the industry faces a two-front challenge: an ageing workforce and no one to replace them.
In today’s episode of the “Start-up of the Week,” International Finance will discuss in detail about the venture.
Knowing The Vision
LiveFlow’s purpose is not to hasten the flow of AI eating into accountants’ jobs, but to stem it. As per the words of Kalkar, “Our plan is to utilise AI to make accounting firms more efficient, but we think the accountant will still be there.”
As enterprise platforms gradually eat into the workflows of accountants, many are choosing to leave the industry, especially as AI automates away a lot of the core, manual work required.
More than 300,000 American accountants and auditors left their jobs between 2019 and 2021, and the number of accountants in the world’s largest economy has declined by 15.9% since 2019, according to the United States Bureau of Labour Statistics. Both younger accountants and mid-career professionals are leaving the profession.
LiveFlow is integrating AI into the accounting, streamlining repetitive tasks through the technology’s help, thereby allowing companies to sync real-time data from their accounting services, banks and payment platforms to the start-up’s platform, which in turn is generating custom reports, apart from automating workflows, consolidating company accounts, and enabling more company-wide collaboration. In this way, the venture is eliminating the practice, where accountants transfer data between systems, often manually.
“Basically, small businesses hire an accountant to feel safe. They want to know that someone has their back. We can’t replace that entirely with technology,” Kalkar told TechCrunch recently.
A few years ago, Anita Koimur led the rewards programme at fintech unicorn Revolut, while Kalkar was its country manager for the Nordic region. Later, as co-founders, both came up with the idea for LiveFlow. They then took the start-up through the Y Combinator accelerator and later raised a seed round in 2021.
Joined by former Web Summit engineering lead Evan O’Brien, Koimur and Kalkar are now planning to expand in the United States with a base in New York. The venture’s newest product, LiveFlow Next, is designed to help accounting firms do more advisory work. And the venture’s existing products, on the other hand, are helping businesses to save countless hours per month while also eliminating human error, during the accounting processes.
Here Are The Products
LiveFlow believes that today’s finance and accounting professionals are buried in tedious and inefficient workflows. The venture is empowering these individuals to reduce manual work and repetitive tasks (by automating them) so they can deliver top-notch services to drive the economy forward.
Talking about the accounting products offered by the start-up, let’s start with “LiveFlow for Google Sheets,” which connects QuickBooks (an accounting software package which mainly caters to small and medium-sized businesses and offer on-premises accounting applications as well as cloud-based versions that accept business payments, manage and pay bills) and payroll functions to Google Sheets and sync a business’ reports in real-time.
“LiveFlow for Google Sheets” helps its users to finish month-end account reporting in record time, as the solution connects to QuickBooks Online easily. The users then can choose from LiveFlow’s library of 100-plus customisable templates and in just a few clicks, create a live dashboard that updates regularly to keep the clients and stakeholders in the loop.
Accounting professionals can also drill down into their reports without logging into QuickBooks, as “LiveFlow for Google Sheets” provides easy analysis of their reports, apart from making checking for errors and inconsistencies simple and analysing spends in seconds.
The tool also performs another tough accounting job called multi-entity consolidation in just under three minutes and the process, also saves days per year in tedious manual consolidation, apart from consolidating multi-entity financials by class and location in a matter of minutes.
“LiveFlow for Google Sheets” also updates online data in Google Sheets on a real-time basis, thereby allowing human accountants to save hours per month updating dashboards and exporting files, while using that time on analysis, rather than crunching numbers.
The next product “LiveFlow for Excel” works in a similar manner to “LiveFlow for Google Sheets.” Now what sets LiveFlow’s solutions apart from QuickBooks is that when it comes to consolidating accounting data of multiple entities in one place, the users can prepare these reports on a record quick time, before sharing them with stakeholders.
Also, the users can customise their reports with their KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics, while selecting from over 100 templates. LiveFlow also handles inconsistent client or business data, which can take hours in QuickBooks Online, thereby saving the users’ time and stress.
At the same point of time, it also helps companies to build impactful consolidated QuickBooks reports for their stakeholders with details like summarised financials for the board, detailed financials for finance review and financials for countries and business units.
Regardless of when a company’s fiscal year ends or what months the clients need consolidated reports for, LiveFlow allows its users to slice data in minutes, apart from assisting human accountants in effortlessly consolidating multi-currency financials into intelligent reports.
“With our platform, you can effortlessly compare the performance of multiple entities, pinpoint numbers, and dive into the nitty-gritty details, all without opening QuickBooks Online. LiveFlow makes it easy to generate reports for a specific division or location of your business in minutes, providing insights into its performance,” the start-up said.
LiveFlow’s Dashboards transform a company’s client reporting with customisable dashboards, seamlessly visualising key data from QuickBooks or Xero, without the hassle of formulae/technical skills.
“Most reporting tools limit the data you can display—not LiveFlow. We’ve built the most flexible report builder! Visualise any data from QuickBooks or Xero exactly how you want, with total customisation at your fingertips. Give clients instant access to their numbers with a live dashboard link, letting them view their data whenever they need it,” the venture described the product in the following words.
The tool combines key data with personalised insights to help clients make smarter decisions with tailored summaries of their financials. LiveFlow users can also create automated dashboards for comparing budgets to actuals, customised to their use cases. When it comes to department leaders within a company manually stitching together all their budgets, the start-up simplifies this mundane job by automatically generating the master budget from individual department budgets.
The Road Ahead
LiveFlow, which as of October 2024 is providing solutions to technology, construction and franchise industries, has got its game right. Through its integrations to popular accounting software such as QuickBooks Online and now Xero, LiveFlow has presented itself as a “One Stop Solution” kind of software, to automate mundane tasks like financial planning and analysis, financial consolidation, and advanced data visualisation, freeing the time and efforts of human accountants from these functions and letting them focus on more quality assignments.
Whereas there is a steady exodus of professionals from the financial field, amid the “AI eating into accountants’ jobs” narrative, LiveFlow’s is now enabling anyone to manage and understand their business finances with ease, through a perfect harmony between man and machine.