How to painlessly scale your business with cash flow management: user-case of an IT recruitment company

User case card

Storypoint — IT recruitment company
🌐 Website: https://storypoint.team/

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Andrii Oleksiienko — Co-founder & CEO of Storypoint
Knows how to build cool teams in IT companies.
His goal is to improve the recruitment process in Ukraine.
Does not like to manually enter data into spreadsheets.
📱 Insragram: @alex__andrew

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Most entrepreneurs agree that scaling a business is always a challenge, accompanied by the possibility of chaos and failure. Yet, the hero of our today’s case study, Andrii Oleksiienko, the founder of Storypoint, does not agree at all. 😉

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He managed to scale his business in one year and increase his income almost tenfold while avoiding financial losses and mistakes. He did it with systematic cash flow management, of course (otherwise why would we be here, right?). In this case study, we tell you how cash flow management helped Storypoint and how you can adopt their experience for your business.

Given

Storypoint was created by Andrii and his partner Diana in 2021. It helps to recruit and hire talented people for technology companies, as well as facilitates outsourcing and outstaffing in Ukraine and abroad.

Prior to launching his business, Andrii worked in IT-companies and built teams from within. Therefore, he knows well what problems both business leaders and employees face.

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For the first 2-3 months of work, the company used spreadsheets to manage finances. However, as the business grew, so did the expenses. They had to dedicate extra effort to enter each transaction into the spreadsheet, and eventually the task became too time consuming. Andrii started looking for ways to automate the processes.

The problem was that all transactions had to be entered manually into our Spreadsheet, where the entire budget was stored. It took a lot of time, so we decided to automate the process and that’s why we chose Finmap.

— Andrii Oleksiienko, Co-founder & CEO of Storypoint

Task

When choosing a solution for automation of cash flow management, the following was important to Andrii:

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1. Financial management should not be time consuming. Business owners and finance managers have enough operational tasks every day. He didn’t want to spend more hours on entering all the transactions manually.
2. It must be possible to connect bank accounts into the cash flow management tool, in order to save time on entering transactions, as well as to avoid losing costs. It was especially important for Andrii to be able to connect the tool with Monobank, because the company’s account was with this bank.
3. Clear analytics for systematic understanding of the company’s expenses and incomes.

Finmap solution

Andrii learned about Finmap from friends. At that time the tool was still in beta testing, but the businessman was not intimidated and decided to give it a try. The crucial factor for Andrii was the possibility to link Finmap with the bank so he would not have to enter all the transactions manually.

One of the reasons was that we have Monobank, and Finmap works with Monobank. It was perfect. Because such an integration between a bank account and Finmap is exactly what we use it for, it’s a major feature for us.

— Andrii Oleksiienko, Co-founder & CEO of Storypoint

Implementing Finmap: Was it difficult?

It was not difficult at all. The implementation of the service did not take long. All that was needed was to register, create a company and connect the bank accounts*.

Finmap has the coolest onboarding. I signed up for the service, linked the company’s Monobank account, and imported all our transactions.

— Andrii Oleksiienko, Co-founder & CEO of Storypoint

* This is what the features of connecting integrations with banks and services inside Finmap look like. Integrations with 2000+ banks around the world are now available in Finmap.

Setting up finance management: Maybe this was difficult?

At the time Storypoint connected to Finmap, the service was still in beta. That’s why Andrii did face some difficulties with the currency conversion*. Payments in USD and EUR that came to the company were not always displayed at the correct exchange rate.

There was only a few cents difference, but because of that discrepancy the debit and credit didn’t add up.

— Andrii Oleksiienko, Co-founder & CEO of Storypoint

* Now, Finmap pulls current exchange rates from national banks of different countries. For example, for Ukraine from the National Bank of Ukraine, for the Czech Republic  from Czech National Bank, as well as from Mastercard.

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This means that for users who have transactions in different currencies, information about exchange rates is always accurate. In addition, it is possible to set your own exchange rate if needed. This, for example, is how the exchange rate is displayed when you enter Income in USD into a UAH account.

To solve it, Finmap offered Andrii the advice of our financial expert*.

The finance expert showed our accountant how to properly structure income and expenses in Finmap. After that, all the statements added up perfectly. Plus, they helped us correctly organize everything, add categories, subcategories, tags. Since then, we are able to analyze our expenses and income in different categories: per employee, per project. That, in turn, helped optimize costs and drop unprofitable projects.

— Andrii Oleksiienko, Co-founder & CEO of Storypoint

* If you prefer, our users can get help from Finmap’s financial experts and choose an assistant, manager or mentor for themselves. You can book free consultation and find out more about this service.

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