As a chartered professional accountant, Ray Fitzpatrick spent years inside big corporations like Irving Oil and McCain Foods, running analysis that tested the assumptions of multimillion-dollar decisions. In those settings, numbers were a compass guiding every move.
But when Fitzpatrick shifted into the startup world, he found that compass was missing.
“There’s a million reasons why you won’t get funded. We make it so your finances aren’t one of them.”
Ray Fitzpatrick, Profitual
“It didn’t seem like accounting expertise was trickling down into small businesses, or at least the startups that I was investing in,” he said.
The trend continued throughout his time as an investor with the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, where he backed dozens of young founders across the region. He encountered founders who knew their product inside and out, but couldn’t make sense of their own numbers.
“I never once invested in an entrepreneur who came from a finance background,” he said. “They were all engineers, computer scientists, life scientists, basically from every walk of life, of which they were experts in their fields, but they weren’t in finance.”
The gap he noticed became his idea for Profitual, a tool that would bring structured financial insight to the people who needed it most. Profitual helps startup founders easily create forecasts, budgets, and financial reports without needing an accounting background.
“We kind of want to be like the Canva for finance,” Fitzpatrick said. “We wanted to make it for the non-finance user and make it so that they can actually navigate the platform easily, understand their business better, and have it at a cost they can actually afford.”
The software splits into two sides: forecasting and reporting. On the forecasting side, users can create detailed budgets and models in as little as 15 minutes, without endless spreadsheets.
Using Profitual’s “building blocks” feature, startups can input information in language they understand that automatically creates their income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow for them.
In his experience, Fitzpatrick said many founders “thought they had more money than they actually had,” only to realize too late that they couldn’t make payroll.
Profitual helps companies avoid financial misunderstandings that can sink a promising company. Founders can also easily add a financing round in minutes by simply entering the amount, structure, and closing date, while Profitual handles the rest.
“We don’t want PhDs in data science to worry about, ‘Does this go on my balance sheet? Does this go to my cash flow?’” he said.
Profitual’s reporting engine strips out accounting jargon in favour of plain English.
The platform automatically benchmarks performance and generates summaries that anyone can understand. “We’re heavily conscious to make sure it doesn’t take on the tone of an accountant,” he said. “The metrics we pull together and the way we have the reports analyzed is from a very generic understanding so that anyone can understand the results.”
When Fitzpatrick launched Profitual three years ago, he expected startups to move on after their first finance hire. In fact, the opposite happened.
He said startup finance leads have embraced the product as “a little finance buddy,” using it to monitor runway, burn, and key metrics. The product helps people with accounting backgrounds understand the realities of startups, and startup founders clearly grasp the details of their financing. “Since the cost is not very prohibitive, we’ve been able to actually stick around a lot longer,” Fitzpatrick said.
Profitual now serves roughly 200 users, all in Canada, with some generating as much as $4 million in annual revenue.
Profitual’s philosophy stems from Fitzpatrick’s time on both sides of the table as a former accountant and an investor watching what happens when startups don’t get it. “The big accounting firms just aren’t a great help to startup companies,” he said. “And the startup isn’t a big enough book of business for them to care.”
Profitual has helped startups like MedReddie, which used the platform to build forecasts, track budgets, and report to investors. With Profitual’s support, the company oversubscribed their first round of financing, and began generating quality investor reports.
“There’s a million reasons why you won’t get funded,” Fitzpatrick said. “We make it so your finances aren’t one of them.”
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All photos provided by Profitual.