Founded in Johannesburg in 2016, Syft Analytics is a reporting and data analytics app that helps small businesses understand financial data better by creating whizzy reports that give them an opportunity to forecast and make real-time decisions. Here, co-founder Vangelis Kyriazis talks about how the app came into being, why Syft’s financial reports help SMEs play with the big boys, and how the Xero App Marketplace, which has just been relaunched as the Xero App Store, helped it garner more than 100,000 business customers worldwide.
Where did the idea for Syft Analytics come from?
In 2016, I had just started running my own accountancy practice in Johannesburg. It soon became apparent that my clients were struggling because they lacked management reporting and analytics.
Having previously worked at an investment bank, I knew big corporations had excellent reporting, with each division receiving a monthly report on actuals v budgets – all presented in strong graphics. Small businesses had none of that. If you’re a tiny e-commerce firm, you don’t have the time or resources to spend two days extracting a report from your data. I really wanted to give my accountancy clients reports and analytics that enabled them to understand their business and make better decisions – all at a low cost.
Did you have any tech experience?
No! I’d only qualified as a chartered accountant the year before. However, there was an IT consultant called Matt [Stephanou] in the same co-working office as me. I told him about the problem my clients had with reporting. He suggested looking at APIs [application programming interface] and we founded an app together.
How can Syft Analytics benefit SMEs?
Although most businesses have an element of reporting, it tends to be very tabular. If you’re a non-financial, non-technical business owner who wants to see trends or interpret data, it helps if this information is presented in a visual format that makes it easy to understand. This is what Syft Analytics does, converting profit and loss statements, balance sheets and EBITDA reports into graphs and other visuals. There’s no setup required; within 60 seconds of creating an account on Syft Analytics on Xero, you can see your company’s data displayed as graphs and charts.
We’ve worked with everybody from Grant Thornton [the professional services firm] to a chain of secondhand shops in South Africa who use Syft Analytics to consolidate data across stores. Using this tech is a big step-up for them: they’re now looking at real-time or daily data, which means the board can make decisions straight away, rather than waiting two to three weeks.
What helped you scale?
Right from the start we wanted to integrate with the biggest providers to get the most potential customers. And Xero had more than two million businesses on its platform. Since integrating with the company in 2017/18, we’ve received so much traffic. We’ve been riding on their coattails ever since. We’ve gone from serving local South African firms to businesses in places such as Birmingham, Brisbane and Brunei. In the last year, we’ve had a major growth spurt. Today, we support nearly 100,000 businesses in more than 50 countries; just over a year ago it was 10,000.
What do your business users like about the platform?
Xero is a great starting point for businesses to see what apps are available. If you’re an SME, you can’t try 60 different apps in one category: there’s too much information to consume. But on Xero, businesses can read reviews of our app, see a few screenshots and a video.
How did your app help businesses during the pandemic?
In March-April 2020 many businesses were in financial turmoil, suddenly going from £100,000 revenues to nothing overnight. Their bank balance and short-term cashflow forecasts suddenly became hypercritical because they were in survival mode: “How can I pay my staff? How can I pay my clients? How much money do I have in the bank to settle expenses? How long is it that my business can keep running?”
At the same time, there were government funding programmes [such as furloughing], which sometimes required reporting on historic performance and projections.
All this financial data was stored on their Xero accounts, and by integrating it with Syft Analytics, they could have both a short-term and long-term cash balance forecasting tool.
How important will data analytics become for SMEs in the years to come?
If I was pitching Syft Analytics on Dragons’ Den, it would be “businesses need to know their numbers”. Accounting data is the core of most businesses: it gives you rich information about customers, expenses and trends. If we can give you that instantly, without any upskilling setup on your side, it can help you make decisions more quickly and confidently than you did before. It really does help you understand your business better.
Find, choose and buy the right apps to run your business in the Xero App Store. Visit apps.xero.com
