Introduction to SurvivalWare

 

SurvivalWare is a financial modeling software package targeted toward small to mid-sized companies.  SurvivalWare is used to streamline the process of financial reporting, budgeting, analysis, financial projections, and cash flow planning.  It gives you the tools to get financial and non-financial data into a structured environment that makes viewing trends, forecasting the future and doing comparisons easy. 

 

At the center of SurvivalWare is a financial model. The financial model brings together financial data from your accounting system with non-financial data from other sources, and performs calculations on them.  Financial data would include things like Sales, Expenses, Cash on hand, and Inventory. Non-financial data would consist of things important to your business but not necessarily captured by your accounting systems, or perhaps any system.  Examples of non-financial data you might want to load include: monthly website visitors, number of employees, square feet of selling space, new prospects, and new customers added.    The non-financial data helps you put the financial data in perspective. 

 

“Key Metrics” can be calculated to help you figure out how your company compares to others in the same industry, and whether things are getting better or worse.  For example, annual revenue per person is a broad measure of productivity that helps you understand if you have the right number of people given your level of sales.  Tracking this number over time tells you whether you are getting more productive or less.  Looking into the future, it helps you figure out how many people you’ll have to hire to meet your sales goals.

 

Accounting systems are great at keeping track of the details of financial transactions of a business, but generally are not so good at analysis and projections.  Spreadsheets can be made to do anything, but can become labor intensive and error prone.  SurvivalWare fills that void by making it easy to load data from the accounting system, and combine the historical and projected data in one convenient place for analysis and manipulation.  The structured environment and pre-defined financial model enforce consistency and accuracy of calculations.

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