Author Archives: Phil

It’s the small things: Printing and CSV export

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We’re (very) hard at work on some big things at Float at the moment, but we know that sometimes it’s small things that make people rather excited.

As such, I know that a number of you will be pretty pleased to see these two tiny little buttons on your Float cash flow:

Going to a meeting? Want to sit and think about your cash flow over a strong coffee away from your computer? That little print button is just for you.

Spreadsheet junkie? Hit that export to csv button as hard and often as you like!

Being able to get your data out of Float easily is just as important to us as getting your data into Float in the first place, so this is just the start. If you have any ideas about what you’d love to see in either printable reports, or CSV exports, just give us a shout in the comments or get in touch via email.

Subscribe for Float by Direct Debit with GoCardless

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I’m delighted to announce that as of today if you are are a UK customer you can subscribe for Float by Direct Debit through GoCardless instead of through PayPal.

GoCardless is a great new service that makes it easy for companies (like us) to accept payments online via Direct Debit. And for customers, it’s much nicer to use than PayPal and because it’s direct debit you’re protected by the Direct Debit guarantee.

If you haven’t subscribed to Float yet, subscribing with GoCardless is easy, first just hit the button on the payment page (if you’re new to Float why not start a free trial now):

You’ll then be taken to GoCardless, which will take you through the rest of the setup process:

 

We’re pleased to use and support GoCardless, as it’s great to see companies making online payments easier in Europe. You may have also seen that FreeAgent recently announced that you can even accept payments online for your invoices with FreeAgent’s recent integration with GoCardless. This is a great move, as anything that makes it easier for your clients to pay you should be good news for your cash flow!

If you have any questions, or if you are an existing subscriber who would like to switch to GoCardless, just drop us a line.

 

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.

 

 

Is your small business too busy for strategy?

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Strategy combines marketing, business development, culture, finance and happiness.As the busy owners of small businesses it’s easy for the months, weeks and even years to slip by without us noticing. Our businesses may continue to run, and everything may seem fine, but are we really on course for where we want to be in the next few months, or years? It is important not to forget about strategy, no matter how small your business is, and to review where you are at and where you are going from time to time.

At Float, we’re just back in Edinburgh after taking a few days out (in the wonderful setting of Balone Castle) to think through our own strategy for the next few months, and year, and it’s been really helpful for us. We are better aligned as a team, and have a much clearer focus on what is important to us over the next few months. If you haven’t thought about where you are at or where you are going for a while, now is a great time to make a start, before the pre-christmas crunch kicks in!

But where should you start? Here’s a few thoughts and tips based on what we’ve learned about thinking strategically.

Your first strategy session

First up, assemble a small team, ideally one or two other key people from the business, and an honest outsider. You want to have people who can all be open and honest about both the business, and their personal goals.

Give yourselves plenty of time to go over it all – perhaps two or three seperate sessions over the course of a couple of days if you can manage it. This gives you time to reflect on the discussion, and come back with new questions and suggestions.

A simple way to structure a strategy session is for each area of your business:

  • Review: collect data, thoughts and notes on what has happened over the last 3/6/12 months.
  • Analyse: based on what you have collected, discuss how you feel it has been, what was good and bad, and what could be worked on.
  • Plan: look forward to the next 3/6/12 months and decide what you would like to change, and how, and how you will measure the results.

Five areas to focus on

Metrics

It’s hard to improve what you can’t measure. As you are doing your review of the last 12 months, think about what questions are hard/impossible to answer. Are there any simple things you can do to track the information that you are missing. You don’t have to be a statistics junkie, but it can be useful to know whether you win 90% of contracts that you pitch for, or only 10%. If you are a web/software development company perhaps you could start an internal project to improve your metrics.

 

Financials

Clearly a key part of doing business is making money. Tools like FreeAgent and Float make managing your finances much easier, but it is still important to review and question how things are going.

Think about:

  • How visible are your finances? Are you keeping on top of your numbers from week to week, or are you just leaving everything for your accountant to deal with at the end of the year?
  • How has the cash flow been? most businesses cash flow peaks and troughs, but did you have any significant crunch points, and what caused them? Did you get caught out by a big tax payment, or a client who never paid their invoice?
  • How much profit have you made? Were any specific projects particularly profitable, or unprofitable?
  • Is your income too reliant on one or two key customers?
  • Are you charging enough? As inflation raises your costs, and your business gets more efficient at delivering it’s services, it’s okay to raise your prices. Think about how much you could raise them by, and how you would introduce the price increase to new and existing customers.

 

Marketing

  • Are you actively marketing your business, or are you just relying on word of mouth from your existing customers to bring in new leads?
  • Which marketing channels have been effective at bringing in new leads, and which ones haven’t? If you have a blog that is sitting on your site never being updated, would it make more sense to just remove it?

 

Personal and business goals

  • Is running the business meeting the personal goals of you and the other directors?
  • How is your work/life balance?
  • Are you happy, or are you just busy?
  • Do you want to grow the business to be something bigger, or are you happy with where it is at now?

 

Culture and Employees

Even in very small businesses, culture is really important. A great culture hopefully means happier, more productive people. And happy staff are also less likely to jump-ship for a new job, meaning you have to re-hire, which can be a disruptive and expensive process for small businesses.

  • How is the office mood? How about on a bad day?
  • Are your employees learning, growing, getting pay rises, and other good benefits?
  • Are you concerned about any employees in particular?
  • Are you keeping your staff in the loop with how the business is doing, and where it is going?

 

How does your small business do strategy? Share your tips in the comments.

 

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.

Introducing Float’s new Sales Pipeline

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A key part of building a good cash flow forecast for your business is having a good understanding of what income you are going to bring in over the next few months. This is often called something like your “sales pipeline”. A sales pipeline is useful for your business as it helps you keep track of:

  • How much you hope to bring in each month (in Float we call this your sales target).
  • What money you’ve actually brought in each month (these are the invoice receipts that Float imports from your accounting system).
  • How much money you are currently owed by customers, and when you should receive it (these are your invoices that Float imports from your accounting system).
  • What money you might make in the future if you win certain jobs or projects (in Float we call these projections).

Many CRM (customer relationship management) tools try to help you track some of these things, but no CRM tools actually tie these sales and potential sales back to your bank balance, to tell you how much money you will actually have in the bank in the future if you win/lose the work. This is why we have been building an improved sales pipeline screen for Float, and it’s looking great!

On top of the four items above, Float also adds projects, which let you group projections and invoices, to make it easier to find them, and see the effect on your cash flow if you do or don’t win projects.

 

Float’s new pipeline screen

Here’s the new pipeline screen in Float. At a glance, you can see your current cash flow forecast, as well as a more detailed breakdown of your sales pipeline for the next few months showing your sales targets, projections, open invoices, and paid invoices. In the table below the graphs you can also see any projects you have added to Float and how much they are worth.

If you want to see what happens if a project doesn’t happen, you can just untick the checkbox next to the project, and it will be removed from your forecast instantly and the graphs will show you what that means for your cash flow.

Float's new pipeline screen

 

Detailed project view

If we jump into a project, we can see all the invoices and projections associated with that project. It’s really easy to add extra projections to a project (useful if you charge your customers in multiple phases), and you can also add any associated costs for the project (like sub-contractor costs).

You can also add any relevant notes about the project to help you keep track of what’s happening with them.

Float's new pipeline, project detail page

 

We think the new pipeline screen is going to really simplify the way you deal with upcoming projects, and let you really easily see the effect they will have on your cash flow – which is a crucial part of business planning. If you are an existing Float user, we haven’t turned it on for all accounts just yet, so just give us a shout if you would like to try it out!

 

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.

Founder Focus #2: Madelyn Postman

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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.

Improving multiple account and credit card support

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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.

Founder Focus #1: Matt Stocker

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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.

MattstockerA 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.

Firefighting and finding focus in a startup

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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/

Getting to grips with Float

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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:

Floatapp-20

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:

Floatapp-22-1

 

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.

Floatapp-23

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

Levelling Up

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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.