How flinder stands out from the competition with Klipfolio

Alastair Barlow is a co-founder at flinder, a registered accounting practice in the UK. He helped build a PwC business, led the London and South East England team, and left to co-found flinder. His background in accounting and consulting, combined with a passion for entrepreneurship, shapes how flinder helps businesses understand their own performance and act on it.

About flinder

flinder was founded in early 2017 by Alastair and Luke, two entrepreneurs who happen to be accountants. They met as founding members of a PwC team working with growing businesses, and after a combined 25 years in that space, decided to build something of their own.

Their view of what an accountant should do is different from the standard. Alastair puts it plainly: "My view of an accounting firm or accountant is that they should be in prime position to really understand the performance of a business, which very importantly does not stop at just financial information. This is a key difference for us and what makes us truly stand apart from other accounting firms. For me, an accountant should be all over the performance of the business, which importantly includes both financial and non-financial information, and this is what we deliver to our clients."

That means flinder clients don't just get a set of accounts. They get a clear picture of what's happening across their business, and what to do about it.

flinder before Klipfolio

Before Klipfolio, tracking client metrics was slow, manual, and unreliable. Alastair describes what that looked like: "Most of our clients would track metrics either within an existing application with out-of-the-box metrics which aren't really fit for purpose, or they were using Excel to manipulate data, which has huge inherent risk issues and version control challenges. This is also human-intensive, time-consuming, and doesn't deliver real-time results."

The problem wasn't just effort. It was that by the time numbers were pulled together, they were already out of date. Leaders were making decisions on yesterday's data, or waiting on someone to pull a number before they could move.

Why flinder chose Klipfolio

flinder's accountants report on both financial and non-financial performance. Financials alone tell one side of the story. Bringing in operational and marketing data alongside financial information gives clients a complete picture of what's driving their business.

Most flinder clients have data spread across multiple sources. The team needed one tool that could connect all of it, refresh automatically, and deliver consistent results without manual intervention at month end.

Alastair recalls the search: "We searched long and hard for an application that did what we really wanted it to do. At our previous organisation we used Tableau, had experience with QlikView, and while evaluating applications for flinder we explored a number of others such as Grow, tapClicks, Geckoboard, and many more on our way to choosing Klipfolio. Klipfolio is streets ahead of the others for what we need and ticks a whole host of boxes for us, including the huge data manipulation power, native data connectivity, but for us mainly the endless API connections that are possible through the REST connector and the white label functionality. Not to mention an amazing support team who are super responsive and knowledgeable!"

The white label capability matters here. flinder isn't building dashboards for internal use. They're delivering them to clients, branded and ready to use, without the client needing to touch a spreadsheet or explain their business from scratch every time they want an answer.

How flinder uses Klipfolio

Alastair is candid about how flinder's use differs from the typical Klipfolio customer: "We may be a little different than the average Klipfolio user in that while we do use it for ourselves, the main purpose is to provide insight to our clients."

Every client engagement starts with a strategy and business objectives workshop. From there, flinder translates those objectives into metrics across functions, from sales activity through to financial trends, and builds dashboards that give clients a reliable, always-current view of their business.

The result: clients know what's happening without having to ask someone to pull a report. The numbers are consistent, connected, and there when they need them.

The metrics flinder tracks span three main areas.

Financial analytics

• Daily sales value, volume, and average transaction value

• AOV trend

• Revenue (in aggregate and by channel and department)

• Gross margin (in aggregate and by channel and department)

• Rolling trends for revenue, gross margin, opex, and EBITDA

• Sales and marketing as a % of revenue

Cash management

• Cash burn, rolling cash burn, and net cashflow

• Profit to cash reconciliation

Prospect opportunity management

• Number of open prospects

• Value of open prospects

• Expected conversion value based on sales cycle status

• Future expected date the sales opportunity will convert

Prospect dashboard example

What flinder has been able to deliver

With Klipfolio, flinder delivers real-time, reliable information to clients in dashboards that are easy to read and act on. No more waiting for a month-end spreadsheet. No more pasting numbers into a document and hoping nothing changed since the data was pulled.

Clients get clarity. Leaders at growing businesses can see their financial and operational picture in one place, trust what they're looking at, and make decisions without chasing anyone for a number.

The flinder team is still building. More dashboards, more metrics, more ways to give clients the kind of visibility that used to require a much bigger team.