Francis

In January, we hosted our first FP&A meetup in Copenhagen. It brought together finance professionals from a range of industries to exchange ideas and perspectives. With input from Nicolaj Søndergaard Mühlbach and Adam Hede, we covered the role of AI in financial planning and heard from Andreas Pagh Glenvig about SYBO's journey to reduce the month-end close from ten to two days. In hindsight, the most valuable part of the evening was the connections. Throughout the year, we’ve heard stories of how attendees have stayed in touch, sharing ideas, offering advice on improving their work, and leveraging each other’s insights and experiences. That’s exactly why we hosted our first meetup: to help build a strong community of finance professionals who are shaping what the modern finance function looks like. And we’re not done. We’re planning another event this coming January and look forward to sharing more details next week. If you’re interested in contributing to the discussion, we’d love to have you join us.

Finance teams often struggle to maintain transparency at scale — once companies reach millions of journal entries, Excel models break down, forcing teams to rely on opaque monthly totals or invest in BI solutions. Our sync engine processes more than 140M journal entries every month, allowing teams to drill down into individual transactions and ensuring full transparency and explainability. To keep pace with increasing data volumes, we recently re-architected our sync engine to support batching and parallelization, with delta syncs coming in 2025. These upgrades have increased processing speeds, eliminated queuing, and enabled our sync engine to process virtually unlimited data volumes — allowing companies with millions of transactions to maintain transparency at scale. Experience the sync engine in action at www.francis.app

Jacob Johannes Wiellersen, Business Partner at Carelink Gruppen, had a small yet interesting observation the other day. When forecasting certain cost items, his team often starts by extrapolating historical data and adjusting it based on subjective evaluation - a common approach. However, there was a challenge: outliers. These anomalies frequently skewed the starting points, making the forecasts less reliable. Jacob and his team proposed a simple yet effective idea: why not use the median instead? While there are more advanced prediction models, sometimes simplicity is preferred. Enabling this in Francis seemed sensible, so we spent a little time adding a =MEDIAN() function to help them solve the problem.

Product Spotlight: Google Sheets Integration Developing accurate financial models requires more than just ERP data. Most finance teams forecast based on metrics contained in CRM, HRIS, and Ops systems. That's where our native Google Sheets integration comes in, giving you full flexibility to import data from all your business tools: → Connect Google Sheets Let Francis generate a sheet on your behalf to set up a connection between Francis and Google Drive. Francis only requests access to the specific Google Drive file created during setup. → Upload Business Data Manually input data directly into Google Sheets, upload CSV files exported from your business tools, or, if you're technical, connect Google Sheets directly to your business tools using APIs. → Forecast Performance With all your business data available in Francis, start forecasting with all the right data in one place. With Google Sheets, you can cover the last 5% of your data requirements without spending thousands on custom data integrations. Questions? Let us know.

73% of businesses say that the finance team is thought of as a back-office function, responsible for admin, expenses, and little else. Jeppe Rindom, co-founder and CEO of Pleo, highlighted this finding from their Aug 24 report during his presentation at Pleo Beyond. Combine that with the fact that more than half (53%) of organizations agree that their finance team is held back by time-consuming admin and unable to build the strategic relationships needed for true collaboration. Finance teams are both skilled and costly, so we think it makes sense to invest in spending their time wisely. What does PLEO suggest as the solution? #1 A new approach to finance and operations #2 Strategic insights and superior decision-making #3 An empowered finance team We couldn’t agree more. Small finance teams that embrace automation can remain agile and effectively support large organizations. Automate data collection. Automate forecasting. Automate variance analysis. Automate reporting. At Francis, we’re enabling this transformation on the FP&A side - focusing on everything that happens after the month-end close.

A new financial model template for Excel/Sheets just dropped! One great benefit of partnering with finance leaders is that we gain insights into how they set up financial models. We’ve distilled all these best practices into one template, now likely on its sixth iteration. The funny thing is - now that we’ve enabled “Export to Excel,” you can get a free Excel model, including formulas and your actuals, in just 20 minutes. It only takes five steps: 1. Sign up for Francis’s 14-day free trial 2. Connect your accounting system 3. Create the template model 4. Map your general ledger(s) and dimension values to the model to import actuals 5. Export to Excel with formulas… or keep it in Francis to further automate workflows. Get yours today.

SOLVING CURRENCY CONVERSION | Part 2 Introducing dual currency rates Following our integration with the European Central Bank, Francis now supports both average and closing rates for conversion of P&L and balance sheet accounts. As per IAS 21, income and expense accounts are translated at average exchange rates, while asset and liability accounts use closing rates. With our new dual rate feature, this process is now fully automated. Available to all users in Francis today.

SOLVING CURRENCY CONVERSION | Part 1 Over the next two weeks, we'll launch three features that will eliminate currency conversion challenges related to financial planning and consolidation. Step 1: Market FX Rates Francis now supports automatic currency conversion using market data from the European Central Bank (ECB). This integration supports both average and closing rates — more on that soon. Available to all users in Francis today.

Congratulations to our partner PENAW for hitting a major milestone: they’re now managing financial planning and analytics for 15 clients using Francis! PENAW is on a mission to build the finance function of the future through digitalization, using software to automate everything from bookkeeping to financial planning. We’re excited to support partners like PENAW who are bringing innovative solutions to their clients, being included in a tech stack that features industry leaders like Pleo and Corpay.

Back when I started my first finance role, I experienced firsthand the challenges finance teams face every day. Dealing with operational complexity while relying on outdated tools (looking at you, Excel and Google Sheets) was frustrating. Managing multiple entities, currencies, stakeholders, and forecast versions only added to the complexity, making the process unsustainable. It seemed irrational that highly skilled (and expensive) finance professionals were spending so much time pushing numbers around. A critical moment for me was when I presented incorrect numbers to my board. I wasn't sure whether it was due to a versioning issue, a collaboration error, or a modeling mistake. That experience made me realize just how inadequate the available tools were in offering the necessary support. As I spoke with other people in similar roles about the challenges in financial planning and analysis (FP&A), I realized there was no clear definition of what FP&A truly encompassed. Everyone had their own idea of where FP&A begins and ends. And if you can’t define it, you can’t improve it. Now, after hundreds of conversations with finance teams, we’re sharing our perspective on the key capabilities essential for success in FP&A. Check out our latest post (link in comments).