Integrated financial and operational reports for growing companies and Startups made easy with Thinknumbers.

We recently caught up with K Krishnan, Founder and Managing Director of Thinksynq, makers of the recently launched software – thinknumbers. Thinksynq is a boutique consultancy and execution company led by business practitioners with over 30 years experience each in the corporate world with diverse capabilities in Strategy, Finance, Sales, CRM (Call Center), Marketing, HR and IT domains along with execution teams. To know more do visit www.thinksynq.in. Thinksynq works with funded growth companies right from their Series-A stage and helps them scale profitably by supporting them across functional domains. In this interview, Mr. Krishnan explains the approach behind their latest software that helps to design a growing company’s Financial and Operational Reporting needs in standard and customized formats.

1. Tell us a little about thinknumbers and how it helps growing companies.

thinknumbers, helps to design company’s Financial and Operational Reporting needs in the industry standard and customized formats. It is a software to take care of all your financial and operational reporting needs. It is the perfect reporting tool which plugs in seamlessly to  several Financial Accounting Systems with ready-made plug-ins available for Tally, Quickbooks and custom adapters to be built for SAP etc. With thinknumbers, you can design your own reports and dashboard in a matter of minutes and access all your reports at a touch of a button. thinknumbers helps in integrating all your financial and non- financial data in minutes. It also helps in tracking actual against plan and against previous periods. thinknumbers provides multiple cuts of your Financial Accounting System data.

2. What led you to come up with this software?

The finance and accounting professionals have long been in need of a tool that would help them be responsive to their business in real time even as they carry the onerous and utmost responsibility for double/triple-checked accurate and secure data. They deserve to spend less time burning the midnight oil for putting together reports for business with their being released productively for analyzing and interpreting the data for the business. With thinknumbers, they can do all this – deliver smart, customizable and visually intelligent reports that get ready in minutes at the touch of a button and accessible anytime from any place with zero discrepancies ensuring one version of the truth all the way. What’s more is that the basic financial accounting system allows only capture of the financial data whereas thinknumbers helps to capture a correlated and integrated view of both financial and non-financial data for better insights. With this unique ability to combine operational KPIs and Financial numbers, thinksynq is the ideal assistant to the CXOs.  The dependence on the finance team or a dedicated analyst is significantly reduced with this automation. This is the product that the industry has been waiting for. Not anymore!

3. What are the various pain points of finance and accounting professionals?

Finance professionals face many pain points. Firstly, most of their reporting work is manual. This kind of end to end manual process leads to major errors and they have to put in extraordinary manual work to make them error-free. Secondly, the reporting work is a repetitive laborious effort month after month. The time spent for creating charts and graphs in Excel with output from Tally and Quickbooks can be better utilized. When the same work is done repetitively, it is an ideal candidate for automation but that is not available for most of the financial reporting work. Thirdly, accounting professionals always have a need to do outside-the-book adjustments to factor in events that are not recorded in the Financial Accounting System. This is manual work. Fourthly, the basic financial accounting system allows only capture of the financial data whereas the management and investors have a need to correlate the financial information with operating parameters.  Fifthly, in the manual process, the same information is presented in different reports at different points in time and therefore can be inconsistent if not double or triple checked for consistency. Lastly, the downloaded source data is stored in excel sheets and goes around to people on emails which is very inefficient.

4. How does thinknumbers address these pain points and need gaps?

Let us first look at how thinknumbers eliminates the errors that arise out of end to end manual process. thinknumbers eliminates errors in report generation done every month because the reports are designed only once.

• Repetitive effort month after month – thinknumbers eliminates the burden of repeating the workings month on month, through a one-time set-up.
• Time spent for creating charts and graphs in Excel with output from Tally and Quickbooks – thinknumbers helps to view all data either in the form of charts or tables.
• Outside-the-book adjustments to factor in events that are not recorded in the Financial Accounting System are managed through a controlled environment in thinknumbers.
• The basic financial accounting system allows only capture of the financial data whereas thinknumbers helps to capture both financial and non-financial data for better analysis of data. The correlation between the financial and operational parameters are done in the one-time setup process.
• thinknumbers ensures single version of truth as all data elements are from a single database. So it does not matter how many ever times you want to use the same information at different times for different reports.
• Downloaded source data remains securely in one place in thinknumbers. It does not get stored in excel sheets and does not go around to people on emails.

5. Handling financial data requires many controls. How do you address it in your software?

thinknumbers provides built-in controls at every stage. This ensures that new account heads are not left out in the reports, data is frozen upon uploading and direct integration for direct import from FAS.

6. How about security? Financial and Operating data for any company is very sensitive. How do you ensure that the customer data remains secure?

thinknumbers uses only industry standard encryption for data traversing, with TFA-based access control. With SOC1 and SOC2 certification, the customer data is well protected for cloud-based operation.