Cash flow management is critical to the success of any business, but can be time consuming. Cenario is a powerful cashflow forecasting tool that makes it easy — here’s how it can help your business.
Cash flow forecasting & management is an essential practice that allows business owners to optimize available cash reserves, predict financial outcomes, and help identify potential cash shortfalls before they occur. The importance of accurately budgeting, forecasting, and following up invoices can’t be understated — Australian SME invoicing data reveals that Aussie businesses lose over $19 billion annually due to late invoice payments.
Accurate cash flow forecasting and budgeting allows your business to predict future sales or inventory status, demand, or outstanding invoices. Managing the large amount of data necessary to perform accurate forecasting, however, can be difficult. Spreadsheets and siloed accounting systems are often inefficient, making it difficult to infer actionable insight.
Cenario is an intelligent AI modeling platform that streamlines the cash flow forecasting and budgeting process. Cenario provides business owners with detailed, easy to understand financial forecasting by connecting to existing accounting platforms, minimizing the time cost of complex financial analysis while maximizing control.
What is Cenario?
Cenario is a versatile forecasting, budgeting, and invoice management tool designed to simplify business finance. As a cloud-based platform, Cenario allows business owners to access their business finance data at any time, from anywhere — but the insights delivered by Cenario are the biggest advantage it delivers.
The Cenario platform is able to integrate with a variety of finance software such as Xero & QuickBooks in order to collect critical financial data. If you’re already using Xero to track and reconcile transactions in business bank accounts this data can also sync with Cenario.
By intelligently collecting and interpreting financial data, Cenario is able to present businesses with detailed financial information at a glance via a streamlined dashboard.
Cenario uses an advanced AI modeling system to find important patterns in your financial data and present it with intuitive graphs and real-time predictive analytics, delivering deep insights into the current status of your business.
Cenario co-founder Vaibhav Namburi highlights the importance of Cenario’s scenario-based forecasting model for Australian SMEs:
“Cenario’s key features, such as smart and adaptive budgeting, one-click invoice chasing automation, direct debit capabilities, and dynamic tax calculation makes business finance simple, allowing business owners to spend less time playing with spreadsheets and more time on meaningful work.”
Forecasting with Cenario
Cenario’s feature set can be divided into three broad sections: forecasting, budgeting, and invoice management.
The forecasting functionality provided by Cenario is designed to allow business owners to create actionable forecasts in a few simple clicks, significantly reducing the amount of time needed to capture meaningful insight from financial data.
Cenario’s intelligent forecasting features allow businesses to model multiple different scenarios in order to determine the best growth path. Cenario forecasting delivers insight in a unique manner — rather than present businesses with complex charts or graphs, Cenario provides simple, intuitive predictions in easy-to-understand plain English alongside helpful suggestions.
Budgeting With Cenario
Budgeting for your business can be a time-consuming process. Cenario’s streamlined budgeting functionality, however, dramatically speeds up the budgeting process by automatically collecting data from other accounting software in order to deliver intelligent budgeting functionality.
Cenario allows business owners to create and modify budgets that intelligently adjust to business needs in seconds without manually entering complex financial data. The Cenario budgeting toolkit syncs with platforms such as Xero facilitating the creation of custom budgets in an adaptive manner. Repeated expenses, for example, are automatically identified by the Cenario algorithm and integrated into budgets.
Cenario Cash Flow Management
Cenario splits invoice management and payments into two separate areas. Cenario’s payments functionality tracks invoices, payouts, transactions, and the status of business clients in order to deliver intelligent insights into the financial health of your business.
The tracking functionality provided by Cenario delivers a simple overview of outstanding invoices and payments due with a simple summary of totals, combined with plain-english recommendations in a similar manner to the Cenario forecasting engine.
The way in which Cenario presents expanded transaction information when compared to other generalized accounting platforms, such as Xero, allows business owners to gain an understanding of the cash flow status of their business at a glance.
One of the most interesting features of Cenario’s invoice and payment management functionality is the “client status” tool. Cenario presents users with a list of clients ranked by payment status, allowing business owners to easily determine the payment habits of their entire client base.
Getting Paid on Time With Cenario
Outstanding invoices can cost your business a vast amount of money — Australian businesses chase outstanding clients for an average of 36 days per invoice. Cenario’s invoice management system automates the invoice collection process, ensuring that your business gets paid on time.
The invoices and campaigns function provided by Cenario allows businesses to create customized reminder campaigns that automatically follow up overdue invoices on a regular schedule. Using Cenario, it’s possible to quickly view a simple breakdown of outstanding invoices, set up reminders or calls, and understand client payment behavior.
Cenario’s invoice management system also incorporates a section that allows users to browse through clients with outstanding payments and view a breakdown of total payments made, outstanding invoices, and even the regularity with which a client pays.
Cenario Pricing & Plans
A major benefit of the Cenario platform is that it offers a starter plan at no cost — Cenario’s free Basic Plan provides sufficient functionality for a single-user, single company account. While the Basic Plan allows for a limited number of scenarios, email campaigns, and email reminders, it does allow businesses to perform up to six months of future forecasting and weekly reporting features.
Businesses seeking more robust functionality are presented with the Cenario Growth Plan, which offers unlimited scenarios, email reminders, budgeting features, and priority support, and is priced at $29 per month. Lastly, a Multi-Business plan allows users to add on additional companies for a further $10 per month, per company.
Key Takeaways
Ultimately, cloud-based accounting platforms such as Xero provide business with streamlined accounting functionality, but lack the predictive and analytical power to provide business with expanded financial forecasting.
Cenario is an ideal solution for Australian businesses seeking a powerful cash flow management and forecasting tool that saves time while providing simple, easy to understand, and visually appealing financial insights.
If you’re currently using a cloud-based accounting platform and are interested in setting up Cenario at your business, reach out to Fullstack for guidance today.
