It’s Friday evening and Jason Tao (name changed, for privacy reasons), the CEO of a startup in the finance sector, has some good news to share with his investors. His company just closed three new sales deals in one day and has three more in the pipeline.
Damian Roller
Guides
It’s Friday evening and Jason Tao (name changed, for privacy reasons), the CEO of a startup in the finance sector, has some good news to share with his investors. His company just closed three new sales deals in one day and has three more in the pipeline.
As he calls one of his investors, Alex, to share the news, they start discussing the impact of these new deals straight away. His investor is currently travelling so he can’t pull up a spreadsheet to check the numbers but luckily that’s not required. Both of them are using the reporting app that Jason created for the purpose which demonstrates the impacts on liquidity and financing in real-time.
As the conversation continues, Jason raises the question of hiring two new employees to boost the sales acquisition process. They end up discussing the possible best and worst-case scenarios of hiring new people, based on the data. When they hang up, Alex sends the news round to his partners. They also have access to the app, and can instantly check the data and provide feedback.
A frequent use case for Open as App is its application in creating a startup reporting app that allows for professional reporting and efficient collaboration with investors. Over time we’ve noticed that when it comes to reporting, startups frequently have the same issues that they present us with when looking for a solution.
Noticing those similarities, we’ve created a story that details the importance of startup reporting, the challenges that companies frequently experience, and how Open as App has helped them overcome these challenges.
Jason has a passion for big data, business intelligence (BI), and innovation. After having spent a few years in the finance sector, he’s decided to give it a go and start his own business. With the AI-based software that his startup has developed, Jason wants to improve customer experience and personalization for insurance companies.
Recently, Jason’s startup received its first major investment. Several investors teamed up to help Jason further develop and scale his software, and to get it on the market. And now there are the latest successes in sales and Jason’s idea to hire more sales staff, which investors need to vet before approving it.
On Monday Alex meets up with one of his partners in the investment company to discuss the new development in Jason’s startup. Using the app, within a few minutes his partner is up-to-date with the situation. He understands where Jason’s company is currently and recommends to hire new people. Then he is off to another meeting but, thanks to the app, he is well informed without having to dig into the spreadsheet.
But it’s not just for investors that Jason needs some kind of business reporting solution. When it comes to his own planning and thinking, Jason also needs something that’s less cluttered, so that he can try out various scenarios and strategize efficiently. Moreover, in his conversations with his colleagues at the startup, and even his own family with whom he wants to share ideas, he must be able to do so in an easy and accessible way.
This is why Jason is using the startup reporting app from Open as App as a solution.
Reports are a central part of the communication between startups and their investors. Reports help keep investors up to date, allow investors to spot issues and take measures or give you advice, and they are a standard requirement in the startup-investor relationship. But good reporting is not an easy thing.
A proper report typically takes a long time to compile while at the same time it has to be dynamic so as to allow for multiple scenarios or prognoses to be examined and assessed. As the most dynamic tool for such data manipulations, Excel is typically the solution that is used for startup reporting.
Easy or not, good reporting really is key to the process of building a startup with the help of investors. Apart from keeping investors up to date, reporting also:
With all of the above in mind, Jason sets out to map out all of the business’s dimensions in Excel. But he soon finds out that the end result is hardly something he can make good use of with investors.
Of course, spreadsheets are indispensable when it comes to creating complex models and calculations. They are literally part of the engine that moves businesses forward across the globe. Moreover, Excel is a universal tool at this point and more or less everyone has access to it or Google Sheets.
But open spreadsheets also have various disadvantages and flaws that make them unfit for the purposes of business reporting, as in Jason’s case:
Business Intelligence (BI) systems, on the other hand, are great for analyzing data and finding trends. They cannot, however, provide forecasts and simulation. When BI is used to create reports these are static, and cannot provide the dynamic reporting functionality which a startup, such as Jason’s, requires. An app that allows you to change content dynamically – as you can do in Excel – can provide this degree of functionality but with greater user experience.
These are only some of the various disadvantages of open Excel data, static PDFs or BI systems when it comes to using them as a business reporting tool. Spreadsheets are, of course, still number one when it comes to getting the right figures for sound decision making.
But seeing the limits of using a spreadsheet for the purpose of reporting and discussing, Jason wonders whether he can utilize the data in a different way. This is when he learns about Open as App.
Open as App allows users to take any type of structured data organized in a spreadsheet and turn it into an app. This requires zero programming skills as the platform will automatically recognize the data, as long as it’s properly formatted, and create the app. Users are given various options to customize the app so as to adapt it to their own needs. This same logic applies to all kinds of apps, whether it’s a simple contact list or something as complex as a startup reporting app.
So what makes it worthwhile for Jason to create a startup reporting app with the data he’s already put into a spreadsheet? Some of the advantages of using an app include:
With that said, let’s have a look at Jason’s reporting app and what it contains.
The following are the central elements featured in Jason’s business reporting app:
Apart from the formatting and design of the app which makes it much more user-friendly than a spreadsheet, it also retains the same functionality and internal logic that the spreadsheet offers. This means that when a value is changed by a user this is dynamically reflected in the various charts across the app. For an example of this, see the following video:
Moreover, the app also allows you to create separate scenarios for your business planning which you can save and make visible only to yourself or to other users as well.
So, to go back to Jason’s case. With his app ready, Jason can easily demonstrate the impact of various business decisions in the Planning tab. For example, by hiring new sales employees and thereby raising the level of employee salaries, it immediately becomes obvious that cash balance will be reduced if other variables stay the same.
But of course, hiring more sales should ideally lead to greater sales acceleration. So by adjusting the monthly percentage of acceleration, Jason can determine the goal that they need to hit to maintain a good balance over time.
Jason now has a tool to simulate a variety of scenarios and make sense of the dynamics of the business. He can use this data both for the purposes of reporting to his investors as well as for the purposes of sketching desired outcomes and setting goals with them.
Moreover, his app makes immediate sense because it only provides the data that is needed for analysis, while keeping the logic in the background where it is safe and does not create confusion for users.
So what did it take for Jason to create his app?
All that was necessary for Jason to create his app was to have an organized and well-formatted data source (i.e. a spreadsheet with charts). After creating his business reporting spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets, Jason then performed the following steps in Open as App:
Because in a flat spreadsheet you can easily see everything, Jason started to make some smart adaption. He added a monthly drop-down menu to his Excel sheet. So, now the charts change dynamically from month to month in his app.
These are all the steps that it took for Jason to create his reporting app. At the same time, the payoff for both Jason and his investors is significant. Jason can use the app on his own to think about the best strategy to adopt for his company, while his investors have immediate access to all the important business data that they require.
Finally, all of Jason’s startup’s data is secure and hidden from sight which allows him to discuss or share the app with other parties without risking to reveal too much.
If you’re curious about how it works, you can try it yourself! Start with our Free plan to give app creation a try and see all the ways in which you can utilize the platform. If you need more features and functionalities, you can then move to Basic or even try our Enterprise package.