Co-founder Coudray Fransz and the story behind Squrro.

Ever since he studied International Management at the HES in Amsterdam, Coudray Fransz-co-founder of Squrro —has been interested in the dynamic and often troublesome relationship between financial control and project management.

“Eventually, I discovered and learned more about project support, project control, and project portfolio management, all abbreviated to PMO. In the early stages of my quest for professional enrichment, PMO was still in its infancy. Most people who knew something about the subject matter were young professionals striving to become project managers. Not me. I wanted to delve deeper into the potential goldmine that is PMO, especially since it was such a poorly studied subject at the time.”

Closing the gap between internal planning and finances

Translating the theoretical frameworks that PMO offers into practical solutions is Coudray’s principal aim. In particular, he strives to eliminate a pitfall that troubles many projects: the gap between strategic planning and finances. Projects are usually defined in terms of a beginning and an end, whilst finance departments tend to plan on a quarterly or yearly basis. The space and discrepancy between these two essential elements of workflow planning cause several issues, including delays, resource constraints, excessive or uncontrolled cost overruns, and lost benefits. “Very often, the emphasis is solely on the financial part of the equation. But in reality, everything begins with correctly planning, building, and linking the most important business processes.”

The best-practice solution Coudray developed is supported by five pillars. First of all, there’s budget determination. What is my financial scope when it comes to CAPEX and OPEX spendings? If you know this, you can create projects and programs and accurately forecast employee and vendor costs. And with the right tools in place, project controllers also have the possibility to process rolling forecasts and closely monitor project progress.

How Squrro benefits your business

Do you know which projects are delivering the biggest benefits against minimal cost? Do you have the right information at the right time so that you are able to make the best possible decisions?

If you’re working with traditional enterprise tools, the answer to these questions is often a big No! These tools can do almost anything, but they are bulky, rigid, and they are not purpose-built. As a project controller, you have to keep track of way too many things to get useful information out of these tools. The result: still incomprehensive and incomplete data sets on which a steering committee has to base its decisions regarding strategic and financial planning.

Squrro makes the complicated easy by pulling finances and planning apart. The availability of a real-time portfolio dashboard and a thorough CAPEX/OPEX report makes Squrro a highly data-driven platform that gives you real and clear-cut answers to the three important questions that define every project. When will the project be completed? What is it going to cost? And will I get what I asked for?

With Squrro, hidden costs and unpleasant surprises are a thing of the past. Financial project control and portfolio management become reliable, simply because the decision-making process is based on real and reliable insights.

“So far, the responses have been overwhelmingly positive,” says Coudray. “Currently, we are busy unfolding several sales activities and providing potential customers and interested parties with demos through our network. In the near future, we want to expand the platform with some additional features. It’s going to be an exciting ride.”