SurvivalWare's Mission
To improve the Mental Health and Well Being (MWB) of entrepreneurs and small business owners through easy to use financial planning software.
Background
SurvivalWare was introduced in 2000.
The product was directed at small companies undergoing cash flow problems (i.e. most small companies!)
The detailed cash planner helped the business owner prepare weekly cash forecasts and move things around to make things work. For uncertain things, like how long it takes to collect a given receivable, or what sales will be next month, you could use ranges instead of definitive estimates. The end result was a graph that told you the probability of meeting payroll, week by week. It was pretty cool. We may bring it back one day.
There was still the need for longer term, non-crisis planning. And the need for financial analysis and reporting. The SurvivalWare software evolved to include a separate module used for monthly financial projections: Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow. Over time, this module came to dominate. The detailed cash planning feature was dropped from the product.
As the consolidation and analysis features were strengthened, we found a niche with franchise companies. SurvivalWare proved to be a great tool for analyzing profitability and cash flow by location.
Each franchise owner could have his own chart of accounts and accounting software. In franchising, the franchisees are independent and may not have identical back office systems. Their financial data could be mapped and loaded into a standard model specified by the franchisor.
By 2015 the business had begun to stall due to a lack of a cloud offering, among other factors. SurvivalWare was written in Visual Basic 6.0 which had become obsolete.
In 2016, we undertook a major effort to redesign and rewrite SurvivalWare using Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Visual Basic.NET. The founder took a full time job as CFO of Issuetrak to finance the effort. Issuetrak became a test bed for the new version. Several customers migrated to the new version starting in 2019.
SurvivalWare 2023 is the culmination of this extended development and shakedown period.
The free version is available now. A licensed version, SurvivalWare Pro, will be released later in 2023.
We also offer training and implementation services for a fee.
The product was directed at small companies undergoing cash flow problems (i.e. most small companies!)
The detailed cash planner helped the business owner prepare weekly cash forecasts and move things around to make things work. For uncertain things, like how long it takes to collect a given receivable, or what sales will be next month, you could use ranges instead of definitive estimates. The end result was a graph that told you the probability of meeting payroll, week by week. It was pretty cool. We may bring it back one day.
There was still the need for longer term, non-crisis planning. And the need for financial analysis and reporting. The SurvivalWare software evolved to include a separate module used for monthly financial projections: Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow. Over time, this module came to dominate. The detailed cash planning feature was dropped from the product.
As the consolidation and analysis features were strengthened, we found a niche with franchise companies. SurvivalWare proved to be a great tool for analyzing profitability and cash flow by location.
Each franchise owner could have his own chart of accounts and accounting software. In franchising, the franchisees are independent and may not have identical back office systems. Their financial data could be mapped and loaded into a standard model specified by the franchisor.
By 2015 the business had begun to stall due to a lack of a cloud offering, among other factors. SurvivalWare was written in Visual Basic 6.0 which had become obsolete.
In 2016, we undertook a major effort to redesign and rewrite SurvivalWare using Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Visual Basic.NET. The founder took a full time job as CFO of Issuetrak to finance the effort. Issuetrak became a test bed for the new version. Several customers migrated to the new version starting in 2019.
SurvivalWare 2023 is the culmination of this extended development and shakedown period.
The free version is available now. A licensed version, SurvivalWare Pro, will be released later in 2023.
We also offer training and implementation services for a fee.