EXCLUSIVE: ‘Crunching the numbers for SMEs’ – Allevo in ‘Discover Sibos 2021’

How Whizzer from Allevo from helps you to put fast financials at their fingertips

Accounting systems might have undergone significant change over the past 40 years, but how much does the boss of a typical SME really know about what’s going on under the hood of their business? More importantly, how quickly can they access that information?

The answer to the first is not as much as they (or, indeed, their financial providers) would like, and, to the second, not quickly enough to impact decision-making and profitability. As SMEs across Europe emerge from one of the most disruptive periods in their history to power economies out of the recent crisis, Romania-based financial software specialist Allevo decided it was time to act.

It’s providing SMEs with the granular analysis they need in a format any non-financial expert can understand, and making that available in real time through one portal. Having co-developed the Whizzer financial reporting tool with Norway’s development studio Bakken & Bæck, Allevo is now inviting potential partners to deliver it as a Cloud-hosted service directly into the hands of entrepreneurs.

Whizzer interfaces with accounting software used by a business or its outsourced accountants, as well as its mobile/online banking apps. It enriches financial information flows and interprets the data to give rapid answers to questions businesses have every day.

Questions such as ‘what are my most recent trading results and how do they compare with a previous period?’; ‘what payments fall due over the next two weeks?’ and ‘what receivables am I expecting?’. This information and more – inquiries around their balance sheets, salary payments, invoicing and cashflow – inform daily decisions as well as longer-term financial planning, such as negotiating a loan or better payment terms with suppliers.

While many smaller businesses do not themselves have the IT infrastructure, or the financial expertise, to carry out sophisticated data analysis, even larger enterprises with the luxury of a chief finance officer will find such insights invaluable. And, because Whizzer is delivered as a service, it has no impact on those firms’ on-premise infrastructure.

Many financial organisations are now focussed on improving services to SMEs – a long overlooked but critical segment – and Whizzer provides them with a way
of delivering cost-effective added value. A bank, local clearing house, accountancy firm, or even an ambitious fintech, are all vehicles for putting such critical financial data at a client’s fingertips.

So, let’s drill down into how Whizzer works. The application takes data from a business’ annual financial report, either via manual entry or import. Information about indicators, revenue categories and expenses is shown both as raw numbers and in an easy-to-understand visual format, with each element currently labelled both in Romanian and English to facilitate an easy conversation with potential partners.

The application connects to banks via API interfaces to retrieve statements. But, as banks in Romania do not, as yet, provide this type of data to business customers via APIs, statements can also be downloaded via internet/mobile banking and imported into the Whizzer app.

Bakken & Bæck designed an algorithm to reconcile this data with incoming and outgoing payments information from other sources, thus allowing Whizzer to generate an accounts payable and accounts receivable report. Whizzer also allows the import of invoices received and issued. These are then checked against incoming and outgoing payments to generate a cashflow report, including forecast.

Allevo and Bakken & Bæck are in the final stages of implementing the Whizzer project, supported by an investment of €738,375 from EEA & Norway Grants, operated by the Innovation Norway SMEs Growth Programme.

The Whizzer software development kit (SDK) is to be published under a GPL v3 open source licence on Github, and will be accessible there or via the fintp.org portal. Anyone interested in finding out more about Whizzer can access the application from Allevo as a beta version.

Let’s empower SMEs together!

This article was published in Discover Sibos 2021, Page 19