Like many creatives, Dryrun co-founder Blaine Bertsch found staying on top of finances challenging in his first business, a creative agency launched in 1999.

The ongoing hunt for the next deal – followed by big bills and big invoices – made addressing cash flow issues and building a solid sales pipeline crucial to keeping the business flush with work and growing.

The idea for Dryrun – flexible, forward-looking cash flow software – sprang from that experience and his desire to tackle the problem. The goal was to create a flexible tool that business owners with little financial background could use weekly or twice weekly to drive their business forward. He wanted to build real-time, forward-looking cash flow and sales models to help business owners with similar profiles.

Modeling for the "what if"

Fast-forward to 2012, when Dryrun got its start.

Every business needs forward-looking projections of near-term cash flow and longer-term sales to make informed decisions and take action before crisis hits. Dryrun’s ability to model ‘what if’ scenarios along a single timeline makes it easy to chart the best course.

It wasn’t lost on Bertsch that business owners would benefit greatly from receiving advice and check-ins from their accountant, so the vision for Dryrun included collaboration features from the beginning.

"Fortune favors the prepared," says Bertsch. With business data easily loaded into a scenario, users can anticipate and avoid nasty surprises and make informed decisions. Picture what your business could do if you could accurately predict when money is coming and going, and when your business will have revenue to fuel growth and reduce your risk of a shortfall.

Among its other benefits:

• Dryrun lets you spend more time in your business, instead of on your business. No more error-prone spreadsheets to decode. Instead, manually or automatically import data.
• Accountants need real-time data so that they can see where their clients sit at a moment’s notice. And, they need a way to effectively communicate with their clients. Dryrun provides them with this, fast and flexibly.

Listening to customers

Before Dryrun was anything more than a problem looking for a solution, Bertsch met with dozens of businesses to analyze and discuss their challenges when it came to cash flow, and most importantly, where they were headed.

From that point forward, customer feedback has been a critical factor for Dryrun within every process and decision. These days, the team tends to use Dryrun’s built-in chat features to keep the lines of communication open with customers. The channel is filled with daily conversations.

Dryrun was a finalist in this year’s Small Business App Showdown. Bertsch and his team say they’re excited to be part of the QuickBooks® ‘perfect team’ of apps that can save time, save money and offer more data to small businesses than they have ever experienced before. "An integrated system of cloud apps can completely redefine the way a small business operates, helping to improve profit margin and strengthen the local economy by competing globally."

The old way meant that accountants relied on spreadsheets to communicate the state of business to their clients. And, most clients can’t stand spreadsheets. Not only that, but past reporting from columns of numbers is not effective as an operational strategy.

Accountants and businesses need to see where the business is going. We can’t think of a better tool for that than Dryrun.