Meet Flowie, a new French startup that wants to facilitate money movements between companies. The company centralizes everything related to accounts receivable and accounts payable so that everyone in the company can see relevant information when it comes to getting paid by clients and receiving money from suppliers.
Flowie was started by Yann Ravel-Sibillot, Rémi Legorrec and Aurélie Hadida. In particular, the company’s CEO already has plenty of experiences when it comes to managing invoices at scale. He was the CTO of Big Mamma and worked on Sunday, a fast restaurant checkout flow.
With this new startup, the Flowie team wants to improve how companies handle invoices. Flowie acts as a central repository for all your transactional data.
It connects with all your existing tools, such as the ERP system that holds your contracts, order numbers, receipt slips, etc. Flowie also integrates with your CRM so that you can get some context about the relationship with a client or a supplier. Finally, it also connects with your bank account so that it can see if you received a payment and initiate new payments.
For instance, when you receive an invoice from a supplier, usually the person in charge of accounting doesn’t really know if they’re supposed to pay this supplier. Maybe your company never received what you paid for.
Instead of having an internal conversation and creating friction, anybody can validate transactions on Flowie. The platform automatically tries to fetch information from the invoice and people in the company can add files to provide context.
When a transaction is approved, you can either choose to pay it now or pay it at some point in the future. If you schedule a future payment, you can notify your supplier that the payment has been scheduled and there’s no need to get back to you about that pending invoice.
On the other side of the equation, when it comes to accounts receivables, companies can upload an invoice on Flowie. It is converted into an e-invoice with a QR code. Clients can click on a link and see different payment methods. They can pay with a bank transfer, a card payment or a direct debit. Flowie also lets you offer early payment discounts.
It’s still early days for the startup. The company has raised a bit of money from business angels and there are 11 people working on the product. But the company has already tracked hundreds of millions of euros in invoices on its platform.