Liveflow with Anita Koimur | E226

Helping small business better manage their cashflow.

On today’s episode of the Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira is going to talk to Anita Koimur. Co-founder & COO of Liveflow. Liveflow is an online platform that pulls data into Google Sheets from various accounting software to allow and enable different workflows and processes more efficiently than currently can be done within that native software.

Episode Highlights:

  • 1.10: When Anita did her research before starting the company, she realized that businesses fail in 82% of cases because of poor cash flow. So she decided to build a platform that would bring clarity to businesses and empower them with real-time data to make better business decisions.

  • 2.28: After joining Unicorn in the UK, Anita had the chance to build the team from zero to one and then commercialize the product and define the go-to market strategy and that was where she met her future co-founder.

  • 3.42: It's amusing and bizarre that the balance sheet and income statement are the first things up there in the accounting world, and most accounts don't even prepare a cash flow statement because they do what they're supposed to do, says Jason.

  • 5.10: A business owner would have multiple spreadsheets, and it's just a nightmare to organize them into a single place, especially if it's Excel, and we just wanted to help them automate everything, says Anita.

  • 8.15: The very first group of people with our solution found that they can connect to multiple companies in one go and pipe all this data in the same sheet from several sheets in real-time without building any custom dashboards again. So that was a significant achievement of ours, says Anita.

  • 12.20: People ask us to integrate the chart platforms, but it's not something very close yet, because we do want to be a financial platform first, and that's something that we can consider going forward, explains Anita. 

  • 15.51: We are very open-minded, and we always say if you have any idea, please submit it because apart from you, there might be like 100 other people wanting the same idea, which will help us prioritize what to release next, says Anita.

  • 19.46: The whole world is moving toward transparency, and Anita thinks the apps should think about bringing business. She wants more connectivity of apps because some don't allow them to pull the data inspector.

  • 20.36: Hiring people very fast is one of the biggest challenges that are not truly sold to startups. The most important part is to be a match on the culture fit, not necessarily 100% of the skill fit.

  • 22.41: As per Anita customer feedback drives her insanely every day because it helps them to shape something that they have today that people love and all of these hurdles that they have been through really helped them to do something that makes sense.

3 Key Points

  1. Banks are not well synchronized with accounting platforms. Accountants, CFO, and business owners often need to collaborate on banking data, and it's very tiresome to switch between the banks, says Anita.

  2. People still use budgeting and QuickBooks and set it up with their mouse, which is not as convenient as Google Sheets for the keyboard. They want it to be there, and they cannot switch to Google Sheets and their budgets overnight.

  3. With Liveflow, you connect to your QuickBooks account or multiple accounts as an accountant, and you pipe all these standard reports in different tabs in your Google Sheets.

Tweetable Quotes

  • “We are building a fundamentally new category of software. We sit at the intersection of SAAS, accounting, banking, business analytics, and collaboration.” – Anita

  • “You can have as many options as people on earth, and you cannot build something that fits everyone in terms of like dashboards that would execute the job they want.” - Anita

  • “I love our customers because they are very creative people. They tell us what they want, which is amazing!” - Anita

Resources Mentioned:

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech