Industry: Software/Services

STR Helper is the leading end-to-end software solution for short-term rental licensing and compliance. In a booming market, their services and products enable local governments to manage compliance, registration, licensing, communications, and complaints for short-term rentals in their area.

With a unique validation process, recurring revenue, and a desire to pursue investors, STR Helper’s CFO used Jirav to build a foundation and strategy for growth.

Many growing startups reach a point where the entry-level accounting processes they started with are now holding them back from pursuing opportunities. That was the case for STR Helper when they brought on Thomas Fasullo as acting CFO. As revenue grew, the leadership team needed more insight to make decisions and a financial model to help them approach investors. Thomas is also the founder of SavvySum, an accounting firm dedicated to software and eCommerce customers, where he uses Jirav for other clients as well. He felt the solution would be a good fit to help him lay the foundation for STR Helper’s financial modeling and investment initiatives.

The initial setup of Jirav was fast and easy. Thomas connected Jirav to STR Helper’s Xero accounting system and Gusto payroll data within 30 seconds, then was able to add additional data from various Excel files using simple templates. The system immediately joined this data into a live financial model of the business.

"To create a financial model in Excel, I've got to spend hours writing lines of code which will be buggy. Jirav requires no coding, so the entire process is simple and accurate," says Thomas.

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Driver-based Comparisons In Seconds

Jirav’s intuitive interface helps CFOs and financial professionals build complex models without coding or math. Thomas can create multiple different scenarios with any assumptions or business drivers to share with the board and investors on the fly.

"Budget vs. actuals in Excel takes a lot of time, and in Jirav, it happens in less than 30 seconds. I can show banks and investors multiple scenarios side by side in a way that makes it easy for outside investors to understand. It's a killer feature."

Customized Validation Costs

STR Helper has a unique challenge to calculate the costs of validating short-term rental properties, which varies widely based on the type and size of municipality. It is a complex process that would take several hours in Excel.

"In Jirav, I was able to click and drag or select from drop downs and model it very quickly. Excel would have meant a lot of custom coding and bugs."

Confident Decision Making

Using Jirav, Thomas provides STR Helper's leadership team connected intelligence across the organization with insights they didn’t have before. They can now track customer acquisition costs, accurately plan their workforce, see their Budget vs. Actuals numbers every month, and much more.

Tailored dashboards and reports enable Thomas to translate highly complex data, KPIs, and metrics in a visual and easy-to-understand way. The CEO can simply log into Jirav to see the real story of the company’s performance and growth in real-time, helping him make more profitable decisions.

Enterprise Power, Startup Affordability

Jirav is designed to provide powerful dashboarding and modeling at an affordable price.

"Traditional enterprise modeling tools such as Adaptive Insights cost tens of thousands of dollars, which is not an option for most companies. Using Excel is also very expensive in terms of paying professionals several hours to create models plus ongoing costs to change and maintain it," said Thomas. "Jirav offers the same or better for hundreds per month with quicker implementation, no bugs, and a clean and simple UI. I can easily share data with outsiders in different views and know our data is safe from manipulation."

Rapid ROI and Value

With Jirav, Thomas appreciates being able to bring more strategic value as a CFO to his SavvySum clients like STR Helper. Companies aren’t paying him to manually import historicals or input data and formulas in Excel. Instead, he can spend more time helping them launch the business forward, which has created a deeper partnership with his clients.

The feedback from banks and investors has been incredible. Jirav helps both STR Helper and SavvySum compete on a different level. We can spend 100% of our time building cutting-edge models and paradigms instead of 10% of it figuring out obsolete code in Excel.