Understanding how Funancial SMART works

Funancial SMART uses a streamlined User Interface (UI) to present the financial intelligence it extracts from a connected company.

Modules

Use the navigation bar on the left to switch from one module to another.

1. Dashboard – a quick, high-level view of your company’s financial health and highlighted areas of your business that may need attention.
2. Cash Flow – an indication of what your bank account is likely to look like – based on historical averages and known data – at the end of this month and the next.
3. Company Health – key indicators of your business that may need attention – issues that may need to be resolved or strengths that should be reinforced.
4. Analyse – allows you to delve deeper into the root cause of identified issues or successful actions.
5. Mange – mange debtors and creditors – identify late-paying customers and chase for payment and identify supplier risks that could lead to issues in the near future.

User interface

As a general rule:

1. Contextual summary information is at the top of the module screen
2. Detail (stuff that is really useful in the decision making process) is in the middle of the screen
3. Contextual additional information (stuff that is may need to be taken into account before you make your final decision) is at the bottom of the screen.  Note: This excludes buttons that we place right at the bottom – these are just there to make navigation quicker.

Where relevant, we use the Red / Amber / Green (RAG) indication system to highlight areas that may need your attention (both in terms of issues that may need to be resolved and successful actions that may need to be repeated):

• Red = Danger – This needs attention – things appear to be getting progressively worse.
• Amber = Warning – Things are heading south and need attention
• Green = Success – Things are getting better
• Dark Grey = Indeterminable – A big word for “we need more information before we can comment”

Basic Concepts

Revenue Lines

Revenue lines is the the term that we use for the matching of Income / Sales accounts to their corresponding Cost of Sales / Direct Cost accounts.

Accountants often categorise Cost of Sales items as Operating Expense items and this is just not useful when making operational business decisions (no disrespect to accountants is intended here – their job requires financial information to be presented in a different way).

A good example of this is the scenario where your company provides services.  Accountants will often allocate the salaries of the employees that provide these services to Payroll Expenses (Operating Expense) where – in business terms – this is what it costs the company to sell these services (Cost of Sales).

Funancial SMART allows you to change this allocation (from Operating Expense to Cost of Sales) by allocating these to Purposes.

Purposes

Funancial SMART works by assigning a Purpose to each and every account in your chart of accounts. Each account in your accounting system’s Chart of Accounts may be assigned to any of the following Purposes:

• – Ignore – No Purpose
• Asset (there are various types)
• Cash in bank
• Equity
• Liability (there are various types)
• Loans I owe (a special type of liability)
• Loans owed to me (a special type of asset)
• Operating Expense
• Income Tax
• Payroll Tax
• Sales Tax

And the most important ones that help with the decision making process…

• Income account assigned to a Revenue line
• Cost of Sale account assigned to a Revenue line

By adding income and cost-of-sale accounts to a Revenue line, Funancial SMART is able to process and present the information in a way which allows you to manage the profitability of the business on a company level AND on a product / service level.