Francis

Flatpay partners with Francis! Flatpay is the honest and transparent payment provider that is taking the industry by storm. Their story began in 2022 when three digital entrepreneurship and payment solution experts came together in Copenhagen to disrupt the market with a simple, transparent, and affordable payment solution for small and medium-sized merchants. Since then, they have expanded internationally to countries such as Finland and Germany. Flatpay uses Francis to consolidate cross-border entities and convert currencies.

Not all stakeholders are visionaries. At times, you'll need to share your financials with banks, investors, and board members who prefer using Excel. Because Francis functions like a spreadsheet, financial models — complete with formulas, functions, and cell references — can now be exported directly to Excel.

Since founding Francis, our mission has been to understand how top finance teams approach financial planning and to identify the capabilities that will define the future of the best teams. Finance leaders like Andreas at SYBO // Christoffer at Globeteam // Jens at Evosep Biosystems // Simon at Coffee Collective // Mark at Les Deux are paving the way. We feel privileged to partner with these individuals, who've helped us refine our thinking and hone in on eight core capabilities. Our work has culminated in a new website, making the future of financial planning accessible to all finance teams: www.francis.app It feels like we just launched our previous website, back in November 2023, yet it only lasted nine months. It still amazes me how quickly we, as a startup, evolve and refine our thinking. Content that felt spot-on just nine months ago became outdated in no time. We’ve finally had the time to create something we’re proud of again. Hopefully, this version will stay relevant - at least for the next few weeks!

Introducing formula comments! This summer, we’ve made several quality-of-life improvements to enhance the modeling experience in Francis. Taking inspiration from how software developers write code, Francis now supports inline formula comments. This feature allows users to add notes and document the reasoning behind formulas or hardcoded values, making it easier to understand complex logic when revisiting formulas in the future. Formula comments are just one example of how our product development at Francis continues to be inspired by the tools and principles used by software engineers. If you want to learn more about how principles from software development can be applied in a finance context, consider reading our blog post (link in comments).

International D2C retailer Les Deux expands its finance stack with Francis! Over the past decade, Les Deux has grown from a small group of friends working out of a basement to selling its products to consumers through more than 1,000 retailers in over 40 countries worldwide. Following a recent migration to Dynamics 365 Business Central ™, Les Deux will use Francis to automate workflows across its finance operations: • Consolidate actuals for seven entities, including inter-company eliminations. • Gather direct input from stakeholders for forecasting purposes. • Structure department and entity-level forecasting across the group.

Sometimes you need to show, not tell — this is one of those cases. People often ask us how long it takes to onboard with Francis. So, for the fun of it, we asked William how quickly he could set up a P&L and balance sheet using demo data from e-conomic. We dubbed it the Francis Challenge and gave him 5 minutes to build everything from scratch. See how he does in the video below. And if anyone can do it faster in Excel or Sheets, we’ll happily send you a month’s worth of Coffee Collective beans.

The primary reason you often need to update formulas in Excel? Time. When creating formulas, you need to specify what ranges to look at. Excel doesn’t inherently understand timeliness built into your model. How would it know that B17:E17 is revenue YTD for 2024? For finance teams working on a monthly cadence, this means updating formulas and ranges regularly or adding complex logic to adjust time periods. In Francis, on the other hand, financial models follow a fixed timeline. When we recently upgraded our function library, we introduced a range of variants — YTD, LY, and LAST — to make modeling simpler and remove recurring tasks. Want to calculate average revenue per month YTD? AVG_YTD(“Revenue”) Easy as that. Read more about recent upgrades and feature releases in our changelog: https://lnkd.in/dmdERhCH

We’re excited to share that Coffee Collective has chosen Francis to power their financial planning. Since 2007, Coffee Collective has crafted exceptional coffee experiences with a focus on quality, sustainability, and transparency. With their quality bonus, Coffee Collective ensures fair compensation for farmers, reinforcing their commitment to sustainability and setting the standard for specialty coffee. Following a recent ERP migration, Coffee Collective has chosen Francis to: • Create individual plans and consolidate them across their eight coffee shops • Automate data imports, forecasts, and reports, moving to a monthly cadence • Improve collaboration and buy-in from non-finance stakeholders

Financial models are constantly evolving. Frequent updates can introduce changes that might unintentionally break your model. We built model health to ensure you remain confident in your model. With built-in rules, model health alerts you to mistakes and keeps you reporting-ready. From mixed G/L accounts to missing conversion rates, model health warns you about issues, helping you avoid those awkward board meetings where mistakes are spotted at the last minute. Model health is built for the future but available in Francis today.

Biotech company Evosep Biosystems expands its finance stack with Francis! Backed by life science investor Novo Holdings, Evosep is revolutionizing protein-based clinical diagnostics to enhance patient care. By collaborating with top scientists, Evosep is developing technologies that improve sample separation, making it 100 times more robust and 10 times faster than today's alternatives. Evosep uses Francis to: • Consolidate actuals across multiple entities and dimensions • Automate rolling forecasts for all three financial statements • Create management reports for investors and stakeholders