Leap Financial Puts Detailed Business Reporting In Startups’ Hands

Most startups struggle when it comes to understanding the underlying financial metrics that typically determine the success or failure of their business. At the same time, they are often keeping the books in online tools with easily accessible data. Leap Financial,  a startup participating in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition this week, wants to make it easy to connect to these services and track their most meaningful business metrics.

The tool, which the founders are calling Financial Planning and Analysis as a Service, has been designed to automate tasks around accounting and help users track key performance numbers like revenue, churn, cost of customer acquisition, monthly recurring revenue and more.

This usually requires pulling together data manually from a variety of sources into an Excel spreadsheet and creating formulas around the measurements. This can be a huge challenge for startups, especially if the founders don’t have a finance background. That’s where Leap Financial comes in.

You simply log into your bookkeeping service, your CRM tool or whatever other accounting service, and Leap pulls in the data and begins generating reports almost instantly, co-founder Raymond Lau explained.

For now the company works predominantly with online accounting and finance services, but it’s working to add CRM and payroll to give a more complete financial picture.

Leap Financial charts

The reports enable users to quickly see their data across time frames (monthly, quarterly, etc.) Each metric is explained in practical terms, including how the numbers were determined, acting as a training tool for founders who might need to learn basic finance on the fly.

There are companies at the higher end of the market, whether older ERP tools from SAP or Oracle, and more modern tools like Tidemark, Anaplan and Adaptive Insights, but Leap is aiming at the lower end of the market. It has an initial target market of high growth SMBs with between 10 and 500 employees, but there is no reason it can’t accommodate larger companies over time.

The company has four employees right now including the two co-founders. It has received $1.25 million in initial funding from a range of well-known Silicon Valley backers including Bowery Capital, Owen Van Natta, ex-COO of Facebook, ex-CEO of MySpace, ex-EVP of Zynga; David Ko, ex-COO of Zynga, current President/COO of Rally Health; Greg Brockman, ex-CTO of Stripe and Ilya Fushman General Partner at Index Ventures and former Head of Dropbox for Enterprise at Dropbox.

[gallery ids="1213351,1213353,1213359"]