Guest post: how marketing and communications agency Chatter manage their cash flow.

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Hilary — No Comments ↓

Bank manager freaking out? Don’t worry, help’s on the way! In this guest post, Paul Ainley—Partner at marketing and communications agency Chatter and a Float founder member—explains how his company is planning more effectively for the future.

Chatter

Along with two partners, I run Chatter, a marketing and communications agency based in Leeds. We specialise in HR communications and help businesses like Skype, MTV and Telefónica to build and manage their employer reputation. We’re particularly strong in terms of digital communications, so get involved in lots of careers websites, employee portals and social media stuff.

Taking Charge of Our Finances

We set up Chatter in April 2011 and were using FreeAgent as our finance and accountancy tool from day one. We quickly realised we needed a forecasting tool that was equally simple to use. Float was the natural choice because of its strong integration with FreeAgent.

When we first started using Float, we could see it had the potential to help us manage the business more effectively, but, to be fair, it had a long way to go. The main reason we decided to buy a subscription was because of the way the Float team engaged with us, sought our input, and fed that into their development plans.

A few months ago, we finally ditched all the spreadsheets and moved to Float as our sole forecasting tool. Being in at the beginning has meant we’ve had the opportunity to help mould the software from a user perspective, making clever technology simple and easy to use.

No More Bank Manager Freak-Outs

We use Float to help us keep track of any opportunities that have been scoped, but not signed off. It helps to focus and drive our sales activity, and keep track of anything that’s outstanding and needs attention. It also helps us to forecast and budget with greater confidence. Like most start-up businesses, we find cash-flow our biggest challenge. Float helps us plan more effectively for the future without freaking the bank manager out!

One final thought: this type of software will enable even the smallest enterprise to manage their business more efficiently, but it’s important to really commit to using it to get the full benefit.

Paul Ainley, Partner at Chatter
0113 3572083 | hello@welovechatter.com

Struggling to stay on top of your business’s financials? Float can help. Start managing your cashflow better today by signing up for a free trial.

Already using Float? Spaces on our Founder Plan are going fast. Help shape Float and get a bargain in the process by grabbing yourself a Founder Plan now.

Posted in Founders, Testimonials & Case Studies

Founder Focus #2: Madelyn Postman

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Phil — No Comments ↓

Cashflow is hard. Here to save the day is one of our founder members, Madelyn Postman of Grain Creative. In this guest post, she talks about how and why she stays on top of her agency’s financials.

Madelyn

Grain Creative

To start—I am a creative director at Grain Creative, a branding and design consultancy founded 10 years ago in Marylebone, London. We work mostly with high-end lifestyle clients on naming, branding, packaging and print and digital work including websites and apps. Our clients include Gucci, Burberry, Qantas and Nokia. For a taste of what we do, see our newest employee’s view on brands.

A Finger on the Pulse

I got my invite to Float in July last year, and became a founder member not long after. I use FreeAgent a few times daily to log time and to keep an eye on everything going on in the business, and I check Float every couple of days—again, to keep my finger on the pulse of the business, the pulse being its cash flow and budgets.

Before Float introduced the budget functionality, I was using a cumbersome cash flow spreadsheet (and I usually love spreadsheets!), bringing over the figures from the FreeAgent P&L every month or quarter. Float and especially the budgeting aspect immediately shows us how we’re doing on forecasted expenses and income, and allows us to set realistic monthly income targets.

Cash is King

I am a designer, but I think that deep down I am really a coder and an accountant waiting to be freed. So seeing Float’s interface design and functionality evolving has been interesting, and helpful to our business on a practical level: it makes budgeting and tracking cash flow easy even for less geeky people too.

If I can coin a new phrase: cash is king!

Madelyn Postman, Grain Creative
020 7524 7550 | madelyn@graincreative.com

Struggling to stay on top of your business’s financials? Float can help. Start managing your cashflow better today by signing up for a free trial.

Already using Float? Spaces on our Founder Plan are going fast. Help shape Float and get a bargain in the process by grabbing yourself a Founder Plan now.

Posted in Founders, Testimonials & Case Studies

Improving multiple account and credit card support

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Phil — No Comments ↓

When managing and forecasting your cash flow, you need to be able to see what your cash situation is like across all your accounts – not just your current account.

I am glad to announce that as of today, Float officially supports multiple bank accounts, and everyone can set it up easily.

Adding more accounts:

You can now easily add any extra bank accounts that you have in FreeAgent to your Float account by clicking the link next to your graph on the cash flow page:

Just follow the instructions on that page to add accounts.

Net Transfers Section

For every account that you have pulled in to Float you will now see a line in the Net Transfers section, and all your transfers into or out of those accounts will appear in here. Here’s an example:

In this example you can see that last month, a total of 3000 was transferred out of my Savings account, and into my Current account. Because they are just transfers between my accounts, the net transfer is zero, so it doesn’t affect my cash flow.

By moving transfers into this section, it keeps your expenses section much cleaner and easier to understand.

Credit card payments

Float also now has improved support for your credit cards. If you add your credit card to Float (see the “adding more accounts” section below) you will see a new line in the expenses section of your cash flow, here’s an example:

This row acts much like a budget, so that you can easily forecast future credit card payments from your current account. Float does not pull in the actual transactions or the current credit card balance yet (we’re still working on that), but this should help you handle forecasting of your credit cards more easily.

Bank Accounts Panel

The panel next to the graph, as shown above, lists the current balances of all your Current/Savings accounts. You will also notice the checkboxes next to the accounts.

If an account is ticked this essentially means “I would like to include the balances and transactions on that account as a part of my cash flow”.

Some people like to think of their available cash as only what’s available in their current account: by unticking the savings account, you can still see how much money is available in it – but not have the balance be included in the forecast.

Have a look and let us know what you think!

Float is the easiest way to create a cash flow forecast for your business that is always up-to-date – no spreadsheets required!

If you aren’t a Float user already, you should sign up for an account now.

Tagged with: features
Posted in Features

Founder Focus #1: Matt Stocker

Posted on April 24, 2012 by Phil — No Comments ↓

Need a cash flow superhero? In today’s guest post, Matt Stocker, an independent strategic consultant, talks about the power to plan and the changing face of financial software.

Mattstocker A Bit About Me

My wife and I together run Matt Stocker Ltd, a strategic consultancy firm that works in partnership with businesses and other organisations to build success for tomorrow—not just today. Whether it’s helping an organisation to envision their future, develop an effective strategy, internationalise their service or product, or implement business excellence, we work with organisations across the strategic development process.

I’m always keen to try out new software and love beta testing, so was thrilled to get on the Float beta in late 2010. Also, given that my cash flow forecasting tool at the time was a Numbers spreadsheet (the Mac equivalent of Excel), Float sounded like a great idea! Being integrated into my accounting software (I use FreeAgent), Float had the potential to save a lot of time and hassle each month.

The Power to Plan

Two things I’ve noticed since I started using Float: more and more, I’ve found myself looking ahead financially, and really planning. Float gives me instant visibility on the financial health of the business and I can easily allocate future spending using that understanding.

Second: I’ve started playing around with potential income and expenditure scenarios, making me much more aware of the impact that different decisions have—this in particular enables me to plan intelligently. I also like the seamless way in which Float deals with the handover between forecasts and actuals (another thing that spreadsheets aren’t great at!).

The Future of Cashflow Software

Today, Float is a cash flow tool that completely blows Excel (and other spreadsheets) out of the water. Moving forward, with the new automatic Barclays Data Services feed into FreeAgent and the recent release of FreeAgent’s API 2, Float will now be almost 100% automated—thereby saving me even more time and opening up the way for some new, exciting and innovative features.

I’m really excited about the potential that Float has in the marketplace—especially with the growth of software as a service (SAAS) accounting tools such as FreeAgent. I believe that Float is one to watch! Having previously worked at a venture capital fund, I’ve seen a lot of businesses for which Float could be hugely useful—either those who don’t currently do any cash flow forecasting at all(!) or those who are still using spreadsheets.

Ultimately, I became a founder member of Float for two reasons—first, Float’s rapid development and resulting trajectory. And second, the potential it has in the marketplace. Oh, and because I like Float’s founders Phil and Colin, and have faith in them. I guess that’s three!

Matt Stocker, Matt Stocker Ltd
02476 100 193 | hello@mattstocker.com.

Struggling to stay on top of your business’s financials? Float can help. Start managing your cashflow better today by signing up for a free trial.

Already using Float? Spaces on our Founder Plan are going fast. Help shape Float and get a bargain in the process by grabbing yourself a Founder Plan now.

Tagged with: founders
Posted in Founders, Testimonials & Case Studies

Firefighting and finding focus in a startup

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Phil — No Comments ↓

It’s easy in the life of a startup to get overwhelmed by the amount of things that need to get done.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that when life is busy, it’s much easier to get distracted from the key priorities.

We’ve been office-less since the beginning of April as we wait to move into Edinburgh’s exciting new incubator TechCube .

I thought I’d really enjoy the process of having some space from the office. I’ve always work out of the office on Fridays (mostly in Loudons because it gives me space to think and reflect better. But now it’s become the norm, it’s a different story.

I’ve felt much more like I want to shoot for quick wins. I feel more disconnected, so I’ll check email and twitter more, and ultimately at the end of the day, I’ve felt unsatisfied with how the day went and what I achieved.

I once heard someone say that a good definition of stress, was a “perverted relationship with time”. As I said at the beginning, there are so many things to be doing, it can feel as if firefighting is the only way to exist in a startup.

While this is sometimes simply unavoidable, I think just sitting down and reconnecting with why we’re doing this, where we’ve got to, and a longer term view of where we need to go next, really make all the difference.

By putting things down on paper and prioritising them, and choosing a manageable amount of them to do today, this week, this month and the next few months, it can bring a focus back, that means the important stuff gets done.

One of the weird things about startup world, is that it always feels like others are jumping ahead, releasing things faster, or getting more acclaim. But in reality building a business that will last, that pays wages, that is a good place to work, takes time, and is just a case of keeping chipping away at it. Understanding investors, understanding your customers and market, understanding your team… take time and can’t happen overnight. Being in it for the long haul and realising how far we’ve come in a year, and where we’re going to be in 5 years bring a big shift in perspective.

It’s the chipping away attitude that helps me settle down and focus. Not try to force things, and ultimately be able to leave the office feeling like we’ve done a decent days work. I can rest a bit – get the energy levels up again, and be ready to go again the next day.

If you like this stuff – check out the energy project too. http://www.theenergyproject.com/

Posted in Discussion

Getting to grips with Float

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Phil — No Comments ↓

We’ve been very busy improving Float over the last couple of months – but we haven’t been as good at explaining how it works, and how to get started. So I want to correct that now with a quick overview of some of the basics of Float to help you get started.

Budgets and Targets

Budgets are the core of Float. When you first set up Float it asks you to set budgets for your FreeAgent categories. A budget is basically a monthly amount that you are saying you would like to spend in that category.

Targets are like budgets but for income – they help you say “I should be aiming to bring in £10,000 per month” and see how you are doing against that target for current and future months.

Ideally you want to spend less than your budgets, but make more than your targets.

Every time you update Float, any new invoices, bills or bank transactions are imported into the correct category so you can see how you are doing.

By clicking on any month header in your cashflow table, you can see how your budgets are doing for that month, and by clicking on any individual budget you can get an even more detailed breakdown, like so:

Here you can see that my sales target is looking pretty good (I have made £4829 of my £5000 target already. You can also see that my “Salary and Bonuses” budget is only half full because only one of two employees have been paid so far this month.

Editing budgets is easy, just pick a month, open the details bubble like I have done above, and hit the grey “edit” button. Your changes will be reflected immediately on the table.

Projections and Projects

Float pulls in all your invoices from FreeAgent to keep your cash flow up to date, but what about the work that is coming up in the future, but that you haven’t started working on or invoiced yet? This is where projections come in.

You can create projections for any income or expenditure that may happen in the future, to see how it affects your forecast using the “add a projection +” button above the cashflow table.

To see how this works, let’s look at the sales “Pipeline” screen. Here is my sales pipeline right now:

The pipeline graph shows four stages:

Your sales target: gray
Your projections (i.e. potential income): light green
Your invoices (from FreeAgent): medium green
Your paid income: dark green

Looking at my pipeline above, we can see that I have plenty of invoices lined up for April, and have almost hit my target – but May is looking a little empty.

But I know that I am expecting to receive some income in May and June from invoices I haven’t sent yet. Using the “add a projection” button, I have added to projections as shown below. And now we can see how the future looks a little better. I can also click on any of the invoices that I have sent and change their “expected payment date” if I think a client will pay late to see how that affects my cashflow.

I could also add a project to group these two new projections together as they are part of the same project, but I’ll leave that to you to experiment with!

Why not log in and try it out: https://go.floatapp.com

Posted in Hints & Tips

Levelling Up

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Phil — No Comments ↓

For the last two years Float has been incubated by IfLooksCouldKill in a lovely basement office in Edinburgh (Scotland). Over the last few months, we’ve felt like it was time we found our own place – and as luck would have it, Edinburgh’s burgeoning startup scene has brought us TechCube - an ambitious project to convert a run down old university laboratory into a startup incubator/accelerator.

The insides of the building have needed a lot of work – false ceilings removed, carpets torn up, wooden boxing crowbarred out, walls demolished – so we’ve spent our last 8 weekends with a number of other Edinburgh startups in “demolition mode”. The first couple of floors are finally being decorated and carpeted – and rumour has it we will be moving in next week.

We’re really excited to be moving into our first “official” office, as well as to help build (literally!) Edinburgh’s startup scene. We’ll post some pics of the office once we’re in – but until then here’s some of work-in-progress shots.

Phil prepping desks for painting.

Colin gearing up.

Some more of the gang.

Posted in News

Did someone say cake?

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Phil — 1 Comment ↓

Photo credit: Will Clayton

We slightly missed the boat (ho, ho) on this one as we have been very busy, but Float turned two a week ago today.

For anyone who’s counting, the first line of code was written at 14:46 on the 7th of March, 2010. Since then we have:

launched our initial private beta
announced our pricing plans to our private beta users
got our first paying customer (thanks Madelyn!)
got a few more
completely rewritten Float to make it a heck of a lot better
so all that’s left to do is to officially launch (watch this space as it’s happening very soon!)

The real heroes in all this are of course all our customers. In particular, our founder members who have been amazing in supporting us, and continue to give us the great feedback we need to make Float a great product.

So Happy Birthday to us, thanks to all of you, and here’s to the next two years!

—

One last thing:

For the geeks/statisticians amongst you, here’s a (very rough) run down of some stats of the Float codebase (across both versions):

In the last two years, we’ve:

made 4182 commits
added 537,170 lines of code
deleted 266,563 lines of code

The new version of Float has a total of 14,106 lines of application code (i.e. code that we have explicitly written, not pulled in from other libraries. This is made up of:

CoffeeScript: 4955 lines
CSS (using sass): 3552 lines
Ruby: 2878 lines
HTML (as templates): 2721 lines

Tagged with: birthday, progress
Posted in News

Counting down to launch

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Phil — 1 Comment ↓

I just got back from 3 weeks in the US, where I got to visit Boston, San Francisco, Palo Alto, and LA. The photo above is from highway 1 on the drive down. Absolutely great.

The main reason for the trip was this course at MIT which was mindblowingly good. I’ll hopefully write a bit more about that in another post.

In my absense Phil has put a lot of hard work into Float, and while its taken longer than we’ve hoped the early beta feedback we’ve been getting over the past few weeks has been very encouraging.

Our quest as always is to not over complicate the interface, and to strip out features, while we discover the most important ones.

We’ll be sending out more invites to the new version this week, and while its not perfect (it never will be!) there are some things we’re pretty excited about.

Here are a few headlines:

Easier Importing

You are now able to map your categories from FreeAgent to the ones you want in Float.

This means that instead of having to explain every transaction in Float, its immediately done for you on import.

Budgets

By setting up budgets, you’ll be immediately able to see how full up your budgets are, and drill into them to the transaction level.

Pipeline

Think of the pipeline as a mini – CRM. Here you can add all the potential projects you’re lining up, and any associated COS or COGS (Cost Of Sales or Cost of Goods Sold).

This should help build up an accurate picture of where you’re likely to be at any given point in the future.

Faster

As Phil wrote about in November the new version of Float has been rebuilt from the ground up, and cuts out a lot of unnecessary screen refreshes, and updates the figures a lot faster. Which make experimenting with scenarios a lot faster!

If you’re currently a user on the existing version of float and would like to take a look at the new version, just get in touch with us, and we’ll get you started.

Not long to go now!

Colin & Phil

Posted in News

Testimonial: Let computers do the donkey work

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Phil — 1 Comment ↓

Float just got a nice little endorsement from Daniel at swombat.com as part of a discussion about the importance of design in new products. Here’s what he said (please excuse the language):

Then I tried Float. Float looks kinda cute, but nowhere near as slick as Pulse. But it works. It pulls all the relevant data directly out of my FreeAgent account (link includes my referral id!) and so it requires almost no shit work. It doesn’t look great, very beta, but I’ll be paying for that one as soon as my trial expires – probably via the “founders’ lifetime membership”.

I wanted to pick up on Daniel’s idea of, ahem, “sh*t work” – as it’s something we think about a lot.

Maintaining cash flow spreadsheets involves lots and lots of mundane, repetitive work. Read this number from this piece of paper, type into this cell, add these cells up, realise you made a mistake, start again…This is the kind of boring work we have computers for! Cash flow statements are only interesting and useful once you can start thinking about what the numbers actually mean. What happens if December sales are half what I expect them to be? What if this invoice doesn’t get paid?

This is why we are building Float. By automating as much of the “sh*t work” as possible, your cash flow stays up to date, and stays useful, with very little work. And with major improvements coming out shortly, including automatically categorising and budgeting most of your cash flow, the upcoming release is going to be even better.

And thanks to @RalphAshby it’s starting to look a lot better too:

Posted in Testimonials & Case Studies