Write once, monitor anytime, financial planning
SVB customers were very busy over the weekend preparing emergency financial plans
Propte is a helpful utility in a financial emergency. Say you are the founder of “Demo Company AU” and you find out in Mar 2023 that you may not have access to your Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) bank accounts for the next 30 days. It’s likely that you already have some variation of a 3 statement financial model available to check that you can meet payroll but is it up to date?! With Propte the data will always be up to date. Without Propte it will take some time to export the general ledger from Xero and import to a spreadsheet to properly assess your current financial position. Your balance sheet format probably resembles this one from Xero:
In addition to the time saving there is the flexibility of having your data in a spreadsheet format. For example you can copy/paste the dataset to compare multiple scenarios.
Back to our Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) customer example. Note that the Net Asset position in the screenshot above (Scenario A) is already negative before freezing the SVB accounts. In Scenario A the company looks like it’s short -$13,501.91 for the month of March. I’m not a CPA but I think it’s unlikely that Xero intended to have negative Net Assets in their Demo Company so I have also prepared Scenario B.
For Scenario B I will make the assumption that the large historical adjustment $19.2k was contributed by the owner or an investor. The source of the funds is a conversion balance on the first day of the Xero history file. The history file is auto generated by Xero for their Demo Company. Let me know in the comments if there is a better explanation for the historical conversion.
In the Scenario B screenshot below we can see that the Demo Company actually has Net Assets of +$6,744. This means that the Demo Company will not need to look for a liquidity provider in March to survive the SVB liquidity crisis caused by the frozen SVB account(s) 🎉.
I like to take advantage of Pivot Tables to contrast scenarios.
All this is possible with Xero, Propte and Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Scenario A’s data will always be up to date in the spreadsheet because it is linked back to the source data table by Propte. That means the SVB customer can come back to this model anytime, say 30 days from now, and see how their actual Scenario A is tracking against their budget Scenario B. This is an example of the linked source data table produced by Propte that will always be up to date.
