Since Syft was acquired by Xero, it has been a popular option for customers needing a Xero cash flow projection. And while it suits many people, it’s not perfect for everyone. Especially if you use tracking categories in Xero or your focus is implementing business plans. In these instances it is worth looking into Calxa as a Syft Analytics alternative.
Turning Your Business Plan into a Future Xero Cash Flow Projection
Short-term cashflow tools like those included in Syft Analytics tell you what’s likely to happen next. On the other hand, Calxa helps you model what happens when you implement your business plan.
Calxa converts your budget into an integrated view of future profit, financial position and cash. It automatically accounts for the timing of customer receipts, supplier payments and key liabilities. This means you don’t need to guess how your income is received and how expenses are paid. Calxa calculates that every day based on your average debtors days and creditor days, using your real history. After that, schedules for GST/VAT and PAYG/PAYE manage the timing of major liabilities.
Bridging the Gap from Operational Budget to Integrated Financial Forecast
A P&L budget tells you whether the plan should be profitable. It doesn’t necessarily tell you whether you’ll have the cash to deliver it.
Calxa bridges that gap.
Your P&L budget provides the operating assumptions. Calxa uses debtor and creditor timing plus settings for taxes and employee liabilities to calculate much of the resulting Cash Flow and Balance Sheet Forecast. Other Balance Sheet plans, including asset purchases and loans, can then be incorporated to complete the 3-way forecast.
Predicted Cash is Useful. Planned Cash is Powerful.
Transaction-led tools are useful for estimating when existing invoices and bills may be paid. But strategic decisions require a different view:
- Can the business afford its growth plan?
- When will working capital become constrained?
- Will we be able to fund a new employee or asset purchase?
- At what point might additional finance be required?
- How would a different sales or cost scenario affect cash?
Calxa turns the operating budget into a forward-looking financial model. This way management can assess whether the plan is profitable, financially sustainable and adequately funded.
Don’t just Consolidate your Accounts, Consolidate your Plans
While Syft Analytics is strong at consolidating financials, Calxa specialises in consolidating plans and forecasts. Calxa brings the budgets, forecasts and financials of multiple businesses together even from different accounting systems. The result is that management has one view of where the whole group is going.
Flexible group structure
Business Unit Trees in Calxa give you the ultimate flexibility in managing the hierarchy of a multi-national group. The “nested consolidations” that Syft Analytics uses can be too rigid. In turn, Calxa will facilitate the creation of different structures for different purposes. Sometimes you want to report on your entities by the region in which they operate. Other times the grouping is based on the products they sell or services they mainly provide. Business Unit Trees give you that flexibility. And within the organisation groupings, you can go further to include departments across the group.
Consolidated planning
Calxa is a management reporting tool and designed to keep your future reporting as simple as possible. Build your budgets, Xero cash flow projections and scenarios at the entity level and roll them up to the group level.
Future eliminations
Intercompany activity isn’t something that only happens in the past with your actuals. Neither should your eliminations. While both Syft and Calxa allow the elimination of individual accounts, if you need something more granular, Calxa provides an elimination entity with a clear overview of the group changes. Syft Analytics has the option to eliminate transactions on past actuals but needs manual journals month-by-month for future partial eliminations.
Scaling consolidations
While both Syft and Calxa don’t specify a limit on the number of entities they can consolidate, Calxa has been tested with 2000 entities.
Making a Choice between Syft Analytics and Calxa
Westcourt Accountants in Perth say that “[Syft Analytics is] a broad financial reporting and analytics platform…Syft’s strength is its breadth; the risk is that breadth distracts from discipline. A strong dashboard does not replace a strong forecast.”
They go on to say that “[Calxa] covers tracking category budgets, multi-currency consolidations, cash flow forecasts and three-way forecasts that combine P&L, balance sheet and cash into a bank-ready pack. Its strength is discipline — useful for budget control, branch reporting and bank-ready outputs, particularly where the business already uses Xero tracking categories well.”
You need to make the decision on which is the right tool for you, based on what you’re trying to achieve. If you know your end goal, this should point you to the right way to get there.
Here is an article we wrote a while back for Xero Cash Flow Alternatives that may be useful in your evaluation.