There is an enormous amount of talent in this geographically small country. From the world of sport to medicine and science and beyond. The IT and tech sector has recently been experiencing somewhat of a boom in Croatia, with many great minds creating innovation. Croatian software developers are among those with some excellent ideas.
As Lucija Spiljak/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 1st of February, 2020, the term financial planning used to be a synonym for a messy and chaotic system for Katarina, Luka, Mateja, Matija and Zrinko in all of their past jobs, in which most reports, they explained, would be created with a lot of manual data collection from many different systems and with delays of up to two months.
Based on the experience of all five of them, with a combination of that experience, knowledge in the fields of communication, IT and telecom, they decided to launch a system that allows small and medium-sized enterprises to easily plan and monitor operational and financial components in just a few clicks. This is the Farseer platform presented by, among sixteen other teams, at last year’s Zicero’s (Zagreb Innovation Centre) pre-accelerator programme – Startup Factory.
The whole idea of Farseer was developed at Kod Biro, a software agency that develops mobile and web applications.
“The guiding principle was to facilitate the process of financial and operational planning and reporting while achieving transparency and saving employees time. Planning and reporting is a critical strategic business management activity, and in most companies, it’s performed on a yearly or a quarterly basis, often using technologically outdated tools, with most of the time spent on data entry and organising inputs instead of strategic decisions and business modeling,” explains platform co-founder Matija Nakic.
The system is intended for middle and senior management participating in the business planning process of an enterprise, and certain operational tasks can easily be given to any responsible person in the system, adds Katarina Trbara.
“We primarily target medium to large companies that, owing to their size and complexity, need structured business planning,” notes Trbara. Furthermore, the system created by these Croatian software developers allows for the defining the structure and process of the plan in a mere few clicks, a significant improvement over Microsoft Excel.
Young innovators have incorporated Excel’s strengths into their user interface, so they have cells, functions and a formula engine, but everything is subordinate to planning. Users receive planning tasks, administrators monitor the completion of the plan and at some point ”lock it”, after which the realisation of costs and revenues is monitored in real time,” Nakic explains.
Among the major advantages of Farseer, the ”child” of these Croatian software developers, are therefore significantly reduced time, the simplification of the process of creating plans and minimising manual tasks, which allows users to focus on strategy instead. According to Nakic, users can easily monitor the results achieved, compare them with the plan and simulate different business scenarios before making any important business decisions.
”We also touched on the general financial literacy of employees and managers in Croatian companies, which young innovators consider to be at an unenviable level. In larger companies with controlling departments, the situation is better, but planning is still seen as an administrative commitment ”done” a couple of times a year, while global trends in this field promote so-called continuous planning, which involves a lot of operational planning and continued simulation. The planning process should be more collaborative and lean towards strategy and defining concrete ways of implementation,” says Trbara.
The young team of Croatian software developers’ desire is that planning with Farseer is something managers actually want to do, not something they have to do. In addition to implementing the system, they also offer planning and reporting consulting, as they point out that they want to help Croatian companies track global trends in this field. They continue to work with Zicer as part of their Startup Factory programme, they say, and have undergone an intensive education process, worked with top mentors and made valuable contacts, especially as young entrepreneurs seeking to improve their product and business skills.
Gaining additional experience, they completed the first version of Farseer, and the entire team is currently focused on selling and integrating Farseer with existing customer systems.
They received an incentive from HAMAG-BICRO to develop an innovative technical solution that will be used for the self-service integration of Farseer with ERP systems.
“Since companies abroad are more mature in the context of orderliness and automation, our primary focus will be on foreign markets, but we’ll certainly continue to talk to regional companies and institutions, among which there are some bright examples,” conclude Matija Nakic and Katarina Trbara.
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