Cashflow is the lifeblood of a business. One of the major threats to cashflow is delayed payments. An article from Paymnts.com states that about 60 per cent of small businesses regularly have invoices paid late, and about 43 per cent of companies have reported a rise in the number of late payments. When a company does not receive its payment on time, its supplier may withhold their goods or services. Operating expenses like employee salaries, rent, etc. get affected. Receiving late payments eats into your reserves, which would have been otherwise utilized to invest in business growth. Cashflow has become more important than ever during these times of pandemic. There is an increasing need for businesses to automate the Accounts Receivable (AR) and Payable processes and tap into the positive effects of digitisation on their cashflow cycle.
CredFlow, the New Delhi-based Fintech startup, was launched in 2019 by Kunal Aggarwal to solve the problem of cashflow management and accounts receivable for SMEs.
Credflow was sown in Kunal’s mind when he gained experience at home and then at his own company, a procurement startup, Rawble, which ran into the vicious cashflow cycle. Kunal discovered that cash flow was a greater issue than procurement, and this set the spark in him to enter the market with CredFlow.
CredFlow is a plug and play model for B2B businesses to reduce their working capital needs and increase growth and profits. The startup automates Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable for SMEs. It offers a cashflow management SaaS platform, which helps SMEs manage their finances by using a dashboard of pending amounts by customers, sending timely payment reminders, validating invoices, and negotiating discounts for early payment.
Here are the key features of CredFlow:
- Seamless integration with Tally
- Automated payment reminders to debtors via Email, SMS and IVR call
- Autosharing of invoices
- Collection CRM to manage your promised receivables
- Track communication history and get your invoices acknowledged/dispute raised via CredFlow
- Auto allocation on accounts payment
and much more.
Currently, CredFlow integrates with Tally, and the integration plan with Busy, Quickbooks and Zoho is soon to happen.
“We have even seen a 50 lakh and a 1000 Cr company using our platform happily. For us, any business that’s run by a single accountant or a founder or with a very high volume of invoices makes for an ideal customer.”
– Kunal Aggarwal, Founder and CEO
Over 5,000 businesses have used CredFlow to process and sync invoices worth more than Rs. 70,000 crores to date.
CredFlow has recently raised $2.1 million in its seed round led by Stellaris Venture Partners, Omidyar Network India, and Flourish Ventures. Marquee angel investors such as Nitin Gupta, Founder of Uni, also participated in the round.
The startup will deploy the funds towards developing its platform, strengthening its tech capabilities, and building new products.
“Delayed collection is a major challenge that Indian SMEs face and capital stuck in receivables is a leading cause for financial stress. Much of fintech innovation in the past decade has been focused either on large enterprises or retailers and micro-enterprises, while the mid-market B2B segment remains largely unaddressed. We’re excited to partner with Omidyar Network India, Stellaris Venture Partners, and Flourish Ventures in helping us leverage technology to realize this mission of making Indian SMEs truly Aatmanirbhar.”
“The plan from here on is one, to grow the number of users. Today we have over 5k users on our platform, we want to reach 70k-80k users in the next 24 months. We want to stay very, very focused on our SaaS product. There are a lot of things still to be built out. We are really focusing on building things that improve the processes even more. We want to enable customers to send different set reminders to their customers creating a credit score for them, enabling them to do payouts and collections through our platform itself, integrating user software like Busy, Zoho, etc. Also, we plan to expand our workforce and hire champions to join us.”
– Kunal Aggarwal, Founder and CEO
The startup aims to build a full-stack solution, including cash flow-based financing, treasury management, and payments management, to help SMEs optimize their cashflows and accelerate their growth.
According to MarketsandMarkets, the AR automation market size is expected to grow from $1.7 Bn in 2019 to $3 Bn by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 12.1% during the forecast period. In the long run, CredFlow could become the financial operating system for SMEs.