Two Financial Technology (fintech) firms are collaborating to help small businesses not only identify an impending cashflow crisis, but also deliver the funding required to return them to health.
CaFE, a cashflow monitoring application, and FloFunder from PeerPay, a platform that matches firms starved of cash with businesses or individuals who are willing to invest, are working together to prevent SMEs from falling foul of cashflow challenges.
The CaFE App links directly to the key accounting software packages typically used by smaller firms, and analyses the creditor/debtor data within the ledger alongside the bank balance, and predicts a company’s cash position over a three-month horizon.
Through a simple traffic light warning system, the App highlights when that company may be running out of cash, or has a cash surplus.
FloFunder, a cloud-based SaaS, similarly integrates with the key accounting packages so that companies looking for money to grow their business can be linked to cash-rich firms or individuals within the trading community (this can be within the accountant’s own client portfolio, or the wider FloFunder community).
David Ireson-Hughes, founder of FloFunder, says that bringing FloFunder and CaFE together will bring clear benefits. “Cashflow monitoring is a useful application but is even more useful if it has a solution attached. By joining forces, SME’s and their advisors can now not only predict a problem in advance, but also find the funding required to prevent a crisis from becoming something more serious,” he says.
Makoto Fukuhara from CaFE says, “Keeping on top of cash flow is one of the biggest challenges for small businesses and yet one of the hardest for an accountant or book-keeper to support without easy access to up to date information. CaFE solves that problem technologically and, when applied with FloFunder, allows the advisor to proactively suggest a solution. Thousands of small businesses could now be saved from the withering effects of an unforeseen cash crisis.”
PeerPay CEO Michael King believes that too many viable businesses continue to fail because of lack of cash. “Statistics at Companies House indicate that more than 275,000 businesses were liquidated in the past year and I am sure that a good percentage of these are because they didn’t have access to cash when they needed it,” he said.