|
Cashpundit, Inc. |
|
|
|
|
March 7, 2016 Issue |
||
|
The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
|||
|
New Automated Cash Flow Management “CFM” Software that Matches Receivable with Payables and Provides Projections |
|||
|
CEO
Cashpundit, Inc.
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – March 7, 2016
CEOCFO: Mr. Muthyalu, according to your site, Cashpundit is the ultimate cash flow management. Would you tell us about your company? Mr. Muthyalu: The number one reason why businesses go bust is that they run out of cash. However, if you ask any CFO in the world how they manage their cash flows, almost all of them will say that they prepare it manually in Excel. Existing ERP packages provide financial statements such as profit and loss, balance sheets, receivables ageing, and historical cash flow statements, but when it comes to generating cash flow projections, people depend on Excel. What Cashpundit does is it identifies potential shortfall in cash balances in advance so that you can take necessary action to avoid cash flow problems. It helps CFOs to know exactly where they stand when it comes to their cash flows. For example, if they want to know what will be their cash flow position two months from now, Cashpundit will provide them detailed projections of what will be their cash in-flows, out-flows, and cash balance after two months. There is a gap in the current ERP softwares, which Cashpundit is trying to fill. In a way, Cashpundit is a CRM for cash flow management. I am a CPA with 25 years of finance experience and I have worked as a Controller and a CFO in multi-million dollar companies, where I used to face this problem. Therefore, I looked for a way to automate the whole function, but I could not find any software out there, so I decided to develop a solution myself.
CEOCFO: Are you surprised that CFOs are still using Excel and have not demanded better? Are you surprised that a solution such as yours was not thought of before? Mr. Muthyalu: To an extent yes. There are a few packages in the market that help you manage your receivables, but when you talk about cash flow management, it is not just receivables alone. You should be able to match your receivables with your payables as well, and this was the part that was missing. There are few other packages in the market, but they expect you to upload your receivables and payables data in Excel and then give you the projections. However, Cashpundit actually integrates with your ERP package, fetches the required data, and projects the cash flows. Therefore, you do not need to enter the data twice or upload the data in Excel.
CEOCFO: What was the biggest challenge in creating the technology? Mr. Muthyalu: Cashpundit is an add-on package for an ERP, and does not stand on its own. Integrating Cashpundit with the ERPs was the biggest challenge. We had to understand the table structures of ERPs and decide the best way to fetch the data into Cashpundit. Few ERP softwares provide you the SDKs if you become their development partner. In such cases, integration becomes little easier since you have the SDKs, and know their table structure. The main challenge was in case of ERPs where SDKs were not available. In such cases, we had to make various sales, purchase, receipts, and payment entries in the ERP and see in which field and table the entered data was getting stored, and then fetch it into Cashpundit.
CEOCFO: What are some of the additional items that you offer? Mr. Muthyalu: In most of the companies, sales people get their sales commission after they collect their receivables. Therefore, the finance department has to give the sales persons the statement of accounts of customers to enable them to collect receivables. Currently what happens is that the finance department downloads the statement of accounts of customers in Excel and mails them to the sales persons. When sales persons follow up with customers for payment, the customers may ask for more time to pay, and even give a specific date on which they will pay. For the finance person, it is very important to know when that money is coming in, so the sales person has to convey the expected date of payment of each invoice to the finance person. The finance persons will then put it back in Excel and prepare the cash flow statement, which is a big challenge that many companies face. However, with Cashpundit, you can give restricted access to the sales persons, to follow-up their customers’ accounts. If a sales person is handling 50 accounts, you can give access to those 50 accounts, and the sales person will only see and be able to follow-up with those accounts. They can even enter the promised payment date that the customer has committed to, and Cashpundit automatically updates the cash flow in the background. That is one feature that I have not found in any other competing software in the market.
Another example would be that in some countries when you give credit to a customer, you also take out credit insurance against that customer. In that case, it is very important to inform the insurance company if the person does not pay the invoice on time. It is very difficult to remember against which customer you had taken credit insurance and then report non-payment of invoices by those customers to insurance company. Cashpundit will track all of these things and remind the finance person when to inform the insurance company of the delay in payment.
In many cases, if a customer informs the sales person that they will pay on a particular date, people actually make a note of that in their own logbook or calendar to call the customer on that date. Cashpundit has a dashboard that will remind you to call the customer on that particular date. It allows you to maintain a history of communication with the customer. It will tell you how many times you have followed up on a particular invoice, as all of the history of company’s communications with the customer is available. All the above features help companies manage their cash flows. Since Cashpundit is cloud based, you can give access to sales persons, receptionists, or any assistants to follow-up the receivables.
CEOCFO: How have you kept it very easy to use and are your clients able to look for information in any way that they want or are there certain restrictions in how they can use the system? Mr. Muthyalu: The software is very simple and user friendly. Any person who can browse the net can use our software. You do not need to be an accountant to use our software. Secondly, regarding whether people are able to get the information that they want, I would say that our software has a great deal of flexibility to select various reports. When I compare Cashpundit with some of the bigger softwares / CRMs, which will allow you to prepare your own customized reports, I will have to accept that we lack such capabilities at present since Cashpundit is bootstrapped. When we get VC funding in the next couple of quarters, we will be able to add more features and give more flexibility to our users to prepare their own customized reports. However, the basic reports that finance and sales persons need for managing cash flows and receivables are presently available.
CEOCFO: How are you reaching potential clients? Mr. Muthyalu: Cashpundit is incorporated in the US, but I am based in Dubai. So we are reaching out to potential customers in Dubai, mainly through referrals. Recently we appointed a reseller here, and their sales person is reaching out to potential customers through email marketing, cold calls, etc. I am from Bangalore India, where we have appointed a reseller partner who is marketing Cashpundit there. We have not gone global yet.
Cashpundit is delivered via SaaS model on a monthly subscription basis. Presently, we are targeting medium to large enterprises where a sales person is going, giving demo, and trying to sell. Our present customers are all from different industries using different ERP packages. We even have orders from the real estate and contracting industries, who are asking us to make a few customizations for them. However, all of this depends on future funding. We have orders that we are not able to execute because they require some modifications, which require time and money.
However, going forward, we will have two versions of our software for different market segments. Basic package that caters to small businesses will be sold on a self-service basis, but right now, it is not available. Enterprise version catering to medium and large enterprises will be sold via distribution partners.
CEOCFO: What has been the reception when approaching people or companies about funding? Is there a general understanding of what you are doing and the necessity? Mr. Muthyalu: As of now, we have not approached anyone for funding. We will start looking for funding after a couple of months and hope to get it by the end of 2016. We recently won a couple of awards and had an article on our company, which will give us some exposure. I have applied for the Red Hearing 100 and am applying for TiE 50. If we make it to the finals of these awards, I am sure it will give us much more exposure in US and help us get VC funding.
CEOCFO: What surprised you throughout the whole process? Mr. Muthyalu: When I started the company I thought that it would be easier to sell, in a sense that I never thought that the sales cycle would be this long. The second thing is that when I started approaching the finance heads, the first thing that they wanted to know was how safe was their data on the cloud, because their information was very confidential. Therefore, we had to go back to the drawing board and study what kind of security features we could offer. We looked at other cloud companies and the security features that they offered and incorporated those features into our software. In fact, we changed our hosting provider to Amazon, which is the number one cloud hosting company. That said, the response of companies has been very encouraging.
CEOCFO: Why pay attention to Cashpundit? Mr. Muthyalu: There are more than 50 million businesses in North America and Europe alone, and almost all of them manage their cash flows manually in Excel. That is a huge number. There are hardly any CRMs in the market that focus on cash flow management. The existing CRMs in the market focus mainly on sales, marketing, receivables, customer service and the support space. Every company in the world, irrespective of its size, industry, and the ERP software used, has to have a cash flow forecast. Without that, companies cannot survive. Cashpundit is a global product and is easily scalable. As per Gartner, the Total Addressable Market (TAM) of CRMs is more than US$23 billion. As per our calculation, the Total Serviceable Market (SAM) is around $2.9 Billion, which is also huge. Cash flow management is a global problem that every CFO is facing. Therefore, our solution has a very huge potential, and as I said, most of our competitors are focusing on receivables or payables alone, but cash flow management is not just about receivables and payables. When you talk about cash flow, it is about receivables, payables, loans, advances, overhead expenses, and much more. I would rather call our solution a Cash Flow Management (CFM) software, a term coined by me.
Recently we have added a new feature where we are actually providing a report that gives the actual sales vs the targets of the sales persons. We are planning to develop an app for smartphones shortly. If you ask any CFO what they are interested in, they will say sales and cash flow, both of which are available on our software at any point in time. |
“The number one reason why businesses go bust is that they run out of cash. What Cashpundit does is it identifies potential shortfall in cash balances in advance so that you can take necessary action to avoid cash flow problems.” - Govindraj Muthyalu
Cashpundit, Inc.
Contact: Govindraj Muthyalu +1 (408) 600-0105 / +971 (50) 624-0815
|
||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
|
Cash Flow Management Software, Cashpundit, Inc., CEO Interviews 2016, Govindraj Muthyalu, New Automated Cash Flow Management “CFM” Software that Matches Receivable with Payables and Provides Projections, Financial Companies, Global Company, Cash Flow Management, Cash Flow Software, How to Manage Receivables, Receivables Software, How to Collect Faster, Cash Forecast, Ageing Report, Receivables Follow-up Reminders, Statement of Outstanding Invoices, Software, Sales Versus Target, Cash is King, Recent CEO Interviews, Cashpundit, Inc. Press Releases, News, Financial Solutions Stock, Companies looking for venture capital, Angel Investors, private companies looking for investors, financial solutions companies seeking investors, cash flow management companies needing investment capital |
|||
|
|
|||
Govindraj
Muthyalu