The other day I got a chance to sit down with Adam Neary, founder of Profitably. Adam has a background in management and data analytics consulting. Throughout his career, he’s seen the same problems and many different companies. From this he decided that solving a single company’s problems isn’t as powerful as developing a methodology to solve everyone’s problems (and I agree).
The goal at Profitably is to automate financial analysis and bring it to small business. The expertise comes from Adam’s consulting and then gets distilled down so small business can access it and benefit from it. And then the service is provided through the cloud so it is easy to consume.
A major function of Profitably is to make life easier for a VP of finance or a CFO, to streamline what that guy has to do every day and alleviate the burden of what uses up his time. This is typically reporting and communicating financial status to non-finance heads. The service was just launched five weeks ago, and they already have over 350 businesses signed up.
The platform’s focus is on customer profitability – which of my customers make me money, which don’t. There’s a near term focus on professional services companies, but this will expand over time. Other questions answered include Which sales channel is most effective? Are you get the value out of your paid search?
For example, you look at your sales funnel and determine which channels are most successful because they have more customers. This is too simple. It would be better to calculate the value of each customer, but this is a somewhat more complex analysis that must take place across service lines and sales people and follow the customer all the way through to figure it out. Profitably does this all for you and generates a lovely chart.
The goal is to make Profitably as simple as possible and save time. You can see the what from Quicbooks and learn the why from Profitably. The company is a full Intuit partner (incidentally Intuit put them through an extensive security review), and the service works by pulling from QuickBooks desktop using Intuit’s connector software. Profitably is working to add additional data sources to shed more insight on customer profitability.
The company is in a pretty good space right now. There’s no app in the marketplace right now that can pull data from a bunch of different sources to inform small business about how much it costs to make a sale, how much the project costs, and whether it makes sense to bring in the business. This looks like a great opportunity for these guys.
Profitably is available on the Intuit Workplace App Center for $64.95/mo. There is a free trial so you can see if the reports are truly helpful for you. Adam estimates that Profitably will save someone 8-10 hours a month, so depending on how much that person gets paid, you could be looking at 10x ROI monthly,
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