LUCAS by NuFinanz – Performance Scorecard

Software Category: Financial Back-office Platform-as-a-Service

Developer / Publisher: NuFinanz

Product Name: LUCAS

Website: Lucas – An end-to-end Automated Bookkeeping Service

Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

Approach: PerfExperts have had a hands-on trial and reviewed Lucas for almost 2 weeks. We found it quite user friendly as well as easy to use. We evaluated the software on following parameters (but not limited to) and here we present you the Performance Scorecard.

Use cases / Evaluation Scenarios: We considered those financial tasks as use-cases that had the following characteristics.

• Tasks requiring high amount of manual intervention (e.g. Bookkeeping, Invoice Matching)
• High volume, repetitive tasks (e.g. Contract Management, Terms)
• Processes that require physical meetings and regulatory compliance (e.g. Auditing Process)
• Error prone processes (Expense Management, Bookkeeping)
• Time-critical processes (e.g. Accounts Payable / Accounts Receivable)
• Processes involving monetary transactions (Payment Processing and Receipt)

Benefits of Using Lucas: Like any other Platform-as-a-Service, this reduces operational overheads, and internal team can focus on more strategic and core tasks besides obtaining following benefits.

• Save up-to 50-60% of their current costs in the financial back-end
• Users might convert fixed costs to variable
• Accuracy of 100% in reasonable time frame (48 hours)
• Complement the current Contracts, Finance and Accounting team through this PaaS suite

Key Highlights: some of the key features that impressed us are,

• Custom built OCR (with ML algorithm) custom built for Indian data/ business readily available on the platform is an advantage. We found that it scores extremely high on client’s parameter.
• 100% Accurate results given within short period allowing teams to perform better and with more confidence
• Payment automation allows finance team to track AP, AR and vendor/client payments or receipts of sales.

Learning Curve Required: Like any proprietary software some training is needed to for an end user to get started but that should be just 1 week. We observed Lucas to incorporate industry standards and focus on leveraging the best practices already.

Pricing / Licensing: One of the most critical buying factors

• The price is based on volume of data uploaded per month per client
• It is quite competitively priced. Since this platform is offered as a service it is not comparable to anything directly.
• The best comparison would be with internal departments and we expect it to help save up to 50% of the costs.
• We looked at platforms like Receipt Bank for bookkeeping automation and NuFinanz is about 40% less expensive.

Customer Service and Technical Support: We randomly called the support number to validate and were pleasantly surprised by the prompt connect and response from NuFinanz.

• They are available in India business hours all weekdays.
• Since the team is remotely available there has been no disruption to their work even during the lock down.
• NuFinanz offers telephone, email and chat channels for support

Initial Setup and On-boarding Process: The setup is normally for about a week, depending on the requirement.

• The main effort is in integration with an ERP or Accounting software (MS Dynamics/ QBO or Tally)
• But if the catalogues are well defined then it does not take much time.
• Upon on-boarding the user roles, KRAs need to be clearly defined as that will define the the user management / privileges.

Expected ROI: Though NuFinanz claims that it can save about 50% of the costs over the available in-house teams, two weeks time was not conclusive for us to really validate that but surely there are significant cost savings. It also helps automate many core processes thereby allowing accuracy and timely Audits, Payments and Data Entry. Since it is offered in form of a service the ROI is visible from Week 1.

Comparison: We evaluated two types of solutions- platform based and service based. Platform based are ready products like QBO, Receipt Bank etc. Since this is offered as a Service we also evaluated the outsourced BPO firms.

What’s Next and PerfExperts Recommendations:

• Integration plugins for  MS Dynamics and SAP apart from the current – QuickBooks, Xero and Tally.
• Chat-Bot Integration for Support
• Four new modules apart from the current Bookkeeping Automation  – Contracts Management, Accounts Payable & Receivable (AP/AR), Payments Automation, Remote Audit Functionality.

Contact Us to learn more…