Business Case Engine

Solution facilitating the financial analysis and simulation of business cases

This mobile app was inspired by SAP business logic and the functional elegance of the HP-12C financial calculator. It is an autonomous part of Prostologic solution facilitating the financial analysis and simulation of business cases. It is designed and carefully engineered to boost the efficiency of business people, financial analysts, managerial accountants and anyone involved in financial assessment.

Most of the info processing (management accounting) can be structured. All structured processing can be transferred to a system, thus reducing flesh&bones in brick&mortar.

The basic premise is that any business development can be better understood if divided into simpler elements, which we call 'business cases'. These business cases normally are interdependent and might even overlap, but each has its own logic, some unique drivers, a clear starting date, and is represented by a set of fully balanced financial transactions.

Business analysis is divided in three sub-processes: 1) formulating meaningful cases, 2) analysis on a case level and 3) Grouping cases in coherent sets with impeccable narratives. The first sub-process is automated by 'DB crawler'. The 'Business Case Engine' or 'Ngn12' as its mobile version handles the second sub-process. 'Prostologic ANN' handles the third one.

Business cases tend to be complex, evolving in scope and time, with tricky inter-dependencies. Even the simplest business case consisting of a single investment with evenly increased sales volume as a return, when simply re-phased by a few months, creates variances all over the financials, impacting Revenue, COGS, Inventory, Operating Profit, Trade Receivables and Cash Flow with Forex variances everywhere.

In this app, the project can be re-phased in one click and the tool will carefully pick all these variances for selected business cases versus any other reporting period and versus any other scenario. All data input is reduced to the absolute bare-bones minimum.

The no-frills smart-phone interface is carefully engineered for maximum convenience, efficiency and consistent performance on a broad range of Android devices.

All navigation is done by single clicking on words, numbers, icons or charts. There are no drop-down menus. Selection from a list of items is done by multiple clicking. For example, the selection of a desired currency is done by clicking on a displayed currency until it is as required.

All lists are revolving. Clicking ↑ or ↓ pushes the list by one line up or down.

The top bar options lead to the main domains:

• 'Cases' to review or edit individual business cases

• 'Analysis' to run variance analysis for a selection of business cases

• 'Rates' to maintain currency exchange rates

• 'Setup' to manage master data, e.g. change reporting currency, chart of accounts, currencies, etc.

• 'Help' brings up a relevant section of this user guide

Most changes after a single click are immediately recorded in the data base and instantly impact the entire application as all processing is on-line (OLAP).

There are two exceptions performed in two clicks due to their broad impact: 1) change of reporting currency and 2) re-set of the data base to original 'as purchased' data.

There is no un-do button - all changes are irreversible. However, the application is designed in a way that any changes other than the two described above, have a limited scope, so while they cannot be un-done, they can be relatively easily re-done.

NPV and IRR calculations are performed strictly on a cash basis with arithmetic as in Excel, e.g. 2,000,000 CHF investment followed by 5-year 600,000 CHF revenue corresponds to IRR of 15.2% and 597,686 CHF NPV at a 5% discount rate over a 6-year period (5 revenue years plus a year of investment).

Similarly, the pay-back period is the period when the cumulated total of cash flows becomes zero.

Complete User Guide is available on www.prostologic.com