M I Broke - Financial Status Analysis
Helping small businesses to quickly assess their financial status. By providing the most comprehensive interface. Leading to all available resources to keep them in business.
To be broke or not to be broke (that is the question).
Imagine you run a small business. You founded it several years ago. Things were rough in the beginning, but now you’re up and running. You do not earn millions but you can pay for all your expenses and you have even saved up some money to be able to expand some day. And then COVID-19 hits! Your accountant is occupied with the problems of larger companies and after your shop is closed for a couple of weeks, you start asking yourself: Am I broke?
How long will my savings last? Will I be able to keep all your staff? How long canI sustain my business? Do I qualify for subsidies?
The business side of your operation has never been your strong side. So how will you be able to predict what is going to happen four or five months from now?
Here is where M I BROKE will come in handy. It is an easy access, fully anonymised and automated platform to predict how long you will be able to sustain your business. All you need to know are rough estimates of your revenue, cash, equity, loans, rent and wages. On the basis of that, M I BROKE will give you a prediction on when you are at risk of defaulting or if you are at risk at all - if you are broke, so to speak. AND - there is more. M I BROKE will let you know which subsidies you can apply for and even suggest creative new ways to get your business out of crisis mode.
Through working together with governments, the EU and different companies across Europe M I BROKE will help you and your business to bloom again.
Inspiration
SMEs are hit hard by COVID-19. With every further day of lockdown the uncertainty and fear of bankruptcy is growing for business owners. This is a large challenge not only for individuals and households but for our global economy. We want to help small business owners like the restaurant next door to get an overview about their current financial situation, estimation for the upcoming months and help them stay in business by providing them with information to help them to help themselves.
Solution
We build a platform that quickly assesses your financial status. It tells you how long you can stay in business and where you can find help.
The application is as easy to operate as the registration for this hackathon. We provide economic insights to estimate revenues for several industries per country and lead them quickly to all resources that are available exactly for them.
The platform is helping business owners to get an overview about their current state and what revenues they can expect from the future. We use data enrichment to provide meaningful predictions with the limited data we are gathering from our customers. We lead them directly to all programs by governments and private Institutions to raise funds and tailor their business to the current situation. As economists we believe that trust is the most valuable currency in this crisis. Therefore, we want to spread trust in businesses, the economy and our future.
Let us take you on a journey through M I BROKE:
- After you have learned about M I BROKE via digital marketing, you get excited about the product and join our platform. You type in your key Information on a monthly basis.
- M I BROKE enriches your information based on your exact type of business, region and financial details with information about other businesses that share those features from publicly available databases and adjust them. Since M I BROKE knows how similar companies progressed from Ben and Lisa’s situation it has a good basis for estimating your future.
- Now it adds the crisis factor. For each Industry there are different scenarios how the crisis will affect your revenue. You can now decide on your own level of trust you have in your business. You chose whether you see yourself on the lower or the upper end of the risk potential for your industry.
- After a few seconds, you receive a simple traffic light based on your financial situation and see how long your business will survive if you don’t take further action.
- Don’t be scared if the traffic light is not green. M I BROKE First, guides you directly to the government funds you have access to. But not only that. It also presents you solutions on how you can survive the crisis by digitizing your business model. Is your restaurant already registered on a delivery platform? Does your Barbershop provide vouchers that people can buy and use after the shut down? We will get exactly the information you need and by helping your businesses with these private partners of ours you are even helping us to stay in business.
The Build
The prototype and its basic functions are fully scalable and expandable. So everything can be migrated to a more comprehensive environment.
The prototype:
- The Frontend is build in R shiny
- The Backend is build in R
- At the moment it is hosted on a shiny server
- Privacy by Design
The platform (concept phase):
- Using data enrichment to increase validity of forecast. This would include seasonality patterns, probability of default and different scenarios for different regions/industries
- Privacy by Design. This will allow us to conduct basic data analysis e.g. which industry is hit by the COVID-19 the hardest and which will follow. A recommendation system telling local governments where future help is needed can be implemented.
Time is out of joint
The biggest challenge we ran into was time. Since we were all super excited about our solution we wanted to include a lot of helpful features which are not yet included in the prototype. However this paves the road for the upcoming weeks. Thus, we are looking forward to finishing our mission and providing help for small businesses.
Accomplishments that we’re proud of
Being part of such a motivated community was a blast. We have finished a minimal viable product of an exciting tool to overcome this crisis for small business in very limited time. Fighting through this last days as one team with ups and downs together to achieve the same goal was an incredible experience. We are proud of the structure and thoughts we put into our strategy but most importantly solutions we can offer to others.
Wisdom
It’s hard. To build everything from scratch. To keep a team together and motivated. To coordinate people, from different backgrounds and with a different skill set. But we got lots of positive feedback and incredible support.
It’s amazing how people came together to find solutions that will help during this time crisis. Our platform, like many others, will not only be helpful during this crisis but also in the time after the immediate impact of COVID-19 or any time of economic downturn in the future.
We deeply believe that M I BROKE will help SMEs to keep their finances in check, develop innovative ways to bring their products to market and help their businesses flourish.
So AM I BROKE or what(’s next)?
Milestone 1 (2 weeks)
- Market launch of our product including some exciting features added to the prototype.
Milestone 2 (4 weeks)
- Business partners for our links
- Outside funding
- Software refinement (more industries, refined predictions, including all features)
Milestone 3 (10 weeks)
- Market launch for all european countries
and ... Follow along what we planned in our business plan
Just click on the Link
Built With
- r
- shiny
Try it out