AIThority.com Interview with Martin Zych, CEO & Co-founder of Jirav

Let’s discuss financial modeling, forecasting, and budgeting solutions.

A financial modeling, forecasting, and budgeting solution helps businesses plan and manage their money. It uses tools to predict future finances, like sales and expenses. By analyzing past data and making budgets, it helps companies make smart financial decisions for growth and stability.

Jirav simplifies complex financial tasks. It’s like having a helpful assistant that organizes your financial information neatly, making it easier to plan and stay on track with your financial goals. Jirav offers comprehensive financial modeling and forecasting solutions that enable businesses to optimize their financial planning processes and make data-driven decisions with confidence. Let’s hear from Martin Zych, CEO & Co-founder of Jirav about the latest trends in financial modeling, forecasting, and budgeting solutions.

Hi Martin, welcome to our AiThority Interview Series. Can you walk us through your journey to becoming CEO of Jirav?

With experience as a Controller, Finance Director, and CFO, I’ve supported numerous businesses on their growth journeys. Throughout my career, like many, I relied on Excel, recognizing its time-consuming, cumbersome, and error-prone nature. Over my career I worked with my high growth startup companies in a finance or accounting role, and ultimately I kept running into the limits of what Excel could handle. So I decided to build the dream tool I wish I had my whole career, Jirav.com to revolutionize and bring to market the next generation of FP&A tools.

What does Jirav offer? Could you tell about the benefits?

Jirav is the brainchild of a finance and accounting expert. Our software revolves around the core principles of financial statements, which include the income statement, cash flow statement, and balance sheet. Unlike many other solutions on the market, we offer a swift implementation process and a user-friendly interface. Additionally, our total cost of ownership is notably lower, making Jirav a cost-effective choice for businesses. We’ve also established strategic partnerships with respected organizations like the AICPA and cpa.com. As a result, our platform is tailored to accommodate outsourced accounting firms and fractional CFOs, enabling them to provide our services at scale. Our goal is to democratize the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) space, making it accessible not only to businesses but also seamlessly integrating with outsourced accounting firms that support small and mid-market businesses across the United States.

How has Jirav helped businesses better understand their financial situation, allowing them to make informed decisions?

Jirav is a versatile financial modeling, forecasting, and budgeting solution designed for agility in financial decision-making. It empowers users to swiftly adjust key assumptions, such as hiring, store openings, or product launches, without the limitations of traditional tools like Excel. Jirav accelerates this process to match the speed of business while consolidating all your data in one accessible location. This allows for historical analysis and real-time monitoring of your business performance. Moreover, Jirav offers interactive scenario planning, enabling you to assess the impact of strategic moves on cash flow instantly. This rapid decision-making capability is especially valuable, as many small and mid-market companies often rely on Excel and Google Sheets, which can take weeks to provide answers for various scenarios. With Jirav, you can make informed decisions promptly, reducing risk and instilling confidence in your business direction.

What is FP&A in Finance? Please give examples.

How are you leveraging AI to connect financial and operational data to explore historical easily, and accurately forecast bookings, revenues, workforce, expenses, and cash flows.

FP&A in finance is the process of planning, forecasting, budgeting, analyzing, and reporting to support the business and the decisions that the business is going to make.

With a user base exceeding 4,000 businesses, Jirav has amassed a wealth of data that provides valuable insights into diverse patterns encompassing expenses, revenue, cost of goods sold, cash flow, and more. Leveraging this extensive dataset and our software’s pattern recognition capabilities, we can harness the power of AI to empower our clients in making informed decisions. This includes drawing upon their historical data for insights and aiding them in shaping future strategies.

2023 has brought about many challenges and opportunities for finance professionals, how they can best approach workforce planning, financial forecasting, departmental budgeting, and automation to reach their goals in 2024?

In recent years, businesses have encountered significant challenges, such as those witnessed in 2020 and 2023, highlighting the imperative to swiftly and effectively plan for multiple scenarios in line with the pace of the ever-evolving business landscape. Many small and mid-market enterprises found themselves grappling with the limitations of Excel and offline systems, which hindered their ability to plan quickly and instilled doubts about data accuracy due to scattered information. As we look ahead to 2024, it becomes increasingly apparent that finance professionals must proactively prepare their organizations to navigate not only the baseline projections but also best-case, base-case, and worst-case scenarios. To achieve this, leveraging technology is paramount.

By incorporating various scenarios into their planning strategies, businesses can preemptively address challenges or capitalize on opportunities as they arise. This approach encompasses workforce planning, revenue forecasting, and real-time scenario monitoring. The ability to consolidate data into a unified platform facilitates faster decision-making, allowing financial professionals to steer their businesses confidently without concerns about Excel model errors or the time-consuming manual updates often associated with Excel or Google Sheets. In this evolving landscape, the key lies in agile scenario planning, harnessing technology, and data connectivity to chart a resilient course for business success.

What are some best practices that individuals should keep in mind always to ensure they have planned well for exigencies?

Establishing a comprehensive framework that encompasses your base case, best-case, and worst-case scenarios is essential. By preparing for these varying outcomes, you position your organization to thrive under different circumstances without excessive manual effort. With a seamlessly integrated system, real-time monitoring becomes effortless, encompassing not only critical financial data but also key performance indicators (KPIs) that offer a holistic view of your business. This consolidated approach ensures a firm grip on your business’s dynamics, enabling agile decision-making and rapid adaptability.

Could you share a few tips for the CEOs of fintech startups?

To thrive in today’s dynamic business landscape, it’s crucial to embrace agility, leverage technology, and remain open to innovative ideas, including those involving AI. It’s vital not to rest on the laurels of existing tools like Excel but instead, be proactive in advancing your business with new software and platforms. Staying at the forefront of industry trends is key to sustained success.

We’d love to know what are your predictions for the fintech domain for 2025.

AI-Powered Financial Services: AI and machine learning will continue to transform the financial services industry, enhancing fraud detection, customer support, and personalization of financial products. Manual processes and the companies that rely on them will quickly become outdated and outpaced by their tech-driven competitors, forcing them to pivot and follow suit.

Increased Cybersecurity Focus: As digital financial services continue to proliferate the market, there will be a heightened emphasis on cybersecurity to protect sensitive financial data from cyber threats.

Sustainable Finance: The focus on sustainability and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) factors will drive the development of financial products and services aligned with ethical and environmental considerations.

Please suggest one fintech-based book for our readers.

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making By: Tony Fadell

Thank you, Martin! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com Tech Bytes soon.