For most small business owners, understanding cashflow shouldn’t require a finance team. One founder is building software to close that gap.
When Ummair Sarfaraz was running a small e-commerce business during the COVID-19 pandemic, he wasn’t short of ambition or effort. What he lacked was clarity. Month to month, he struggled to get a reliable picture of his financial position — where money was coming from, when it would arrive, and what pressures were building just below the surface.
The business didn’t survive. But the experience left him with a question he couldn’t let go of: why is this kind of financial visibility so difficult for small businesses to access?
That question eventually led to Finanna Pro, a financial intelligence platform he has built for small and medium-sized enterprises. The product is designed to give founders the kind of analytical tools that have, until now, largely existed behind the walls of private equity firms and large corporations.
The Problem Hiding in Plain Sight
The financial challenges facing SMEs are well-documented but rarely solved at the software level. Most small business owners manage their finances through a combination of accounting software, spreadsheets, and periodic conversations with their accountant. This approach has obvious limits.
Spreadsheets can capture what has already happened, but they offer little in the way of forward-looking analysis. They don’t automatically flag cashflow risks, model the impact of different business decisions, or generate a clear narrative about the health of the business. For founders juggling sales, operations, and product development simultaneously, the financial picture often becomes something they check reactively, rather than something they use proactively.
The problem is compounded by cost. Sophisticated financial modelling, cashflow forecasting, and performance analytics have traditionally required either specialist finance staff or costly advisory services. Neither is realistic for most businesses operating at the SME level.
After his own experience, Ummair began speaking with other founders. The pattern he found was consistent. “Most small business owners I spoke with were flying blind on their finances,” he said. “They knew the numbers existed somewhere, but they didn’t have the tools to turn those numbers into decisions. That’s a problem that doesn’t get talked about enough.”
From Analyst to Founder
Before starting Finanna Pro, Ummair spent around five years working as a finance data analyst, building analytical systems and working with financial data across different business contexts. That background shaped how he thought about the problem.
Where most people might see a cash management issue, he saw a data accessibility issue. The underlying financial information exists in most small businesses. What’s missing is the infrastructure to process it, model it, and surface it in a way that a non-specialist can act on.
That insight became the foundation for Finanna Pro. Rather than building another accounting tool, Ummair set out to create something closer to a financial intelligence layer — a system that takes raw financial data and produces structured analysis, forecasts, and narrative insights that founders can actually use.
How Finanna Pro Works
The platform is built around several interconnected components. At its core is a financial modelling engine that processes business data and produces structured outputs — projections, scenario models, and performance analytics. Alongside this sits a cashflow forecasting module, designed to help founders understand not just current liquidity, but where pressures are likely to emerge in the weeks and months ahead.
To build out the platform’s backend infrastructure and API systems, Ummair brought in Zia Zafar, a software developer with experience in backend engineering and data tooling. Zafar has contributed to the technical architecture that underpins the platform’s core functionality.
One of the more distinctive elements of the platform is its AI-generated financial narrative capability. Rather than presenting founders with charts and figures alone, Finanna Pro translates financial data into written summaries — plain-language explanations of what the numbers mean and what they suggest about the business’s direction.
The platform also includes an analytics dashboard and backend API infrastructure, allowing data to flow across the system and be surfaced through a single interface.
Closing the Accessibility Gap
The broader argument Ummair is making is about access rather than innovation for its own sake. Financial intelligence tools of this kind have existed for years in enterprise contexts. Investment teams, large corporations, and PE-backed businesses have long relied on sophisticated modelling and forecasting capabilities. The gap has always been at the smaller end of the market.
“There’s no reason a company with five or ten employees should be making decisions without decent financial visibility,” Ummair said. “The gap isn’t about capability it’s about access. We’re trying to change that.”
For more information, visit: https://finannapro.com
Founder LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ummair-sarfaraz
