Institute of Chartered Accounts of India (ICAI)-incubated startup Firmway, which automates financial reconciliation and customer collections, said it has raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-seed funding round from chief financial officers (CFO) and audit partners of Big Four and large CA firms.
The capital will be deployed by the Mumbai-based startup to strengthen its proprietary algorithms through machine learning and data analytics and deploy its accounts automation tools at 5,000 corporate entities across India by March 2023.
“It is estimated that a business loses around 10 percent of its net profit every year due to bad debts, unclaimed GST (goods and services tax) credits, TDS (tax deducted at source) mismatch, hidden charges, duplicate payments, accounting frauds, long collection cycle, and so on,” said Firmway Co-founder and CEO Prashant Gupta. “With our easy-to-use SaaS software, we enable enterprises and SMEs (small and medium enterprises) to encash the benefit to their bottom line.”
Founded in 2016 by chartered accountants Prashant, Vivek Chandan, and Jay Savla, Firmway integrates with current accounting software and aims to resolve all inefficiencies between companies and their customers and vendors on a real-time basis. Its Smart Accounts Reconciliation tool that auto-reconciles customer ledgers, vendor ledgers, and GSTR 2A, 26 AS, along with tools for balance/audit confirmation, receivable management, and data management are helping companies increase their bottom line.
The platform claims to have connected more than 1 lakh businesses and reconciled entries worth Rs 4.5 lakh crore. Its proprietary algorithms have not only identified discrepancies worth Rs 27,000 crore, but also helped resolve them through its communication system.
“The real challenge in Indian accounting is that it’s not streamlined,” said Jignesh Kenia, Firmway advisor and former CFO of UTV. “The real power of Firmway lies in how they are able to solve this through their extremely simple-to-use solution as compared to complicated global solutions. It takes care of the digital adoption of Indian businesses and unstructured accounting data.”
According to Arun Diaz, lead investor at Firmway, “With right strategy, key business partnerships, and enterprise-grade SaaS solutions, Firmway is on a path of solving the real problem of revenue leakages for growing businesses through its unique and tested solutions.”