What tipped the scales in favor of COMMITLY in the end? 

These were mainly 3 reasons: First: Usabilty. For me it was important that a tool is intuitively usable, reduces complexity and keeps the time required to a minimum. For me, COMMITLY fulfills all these points excellently. 

Second, the price. In my eyes, COMMITLY offers unbeatable value for money compared to the competition, not to mention the beautiful user experience I mentioned earlier. The price packages were a good fit for our needs, so we quickly found the right setup. 

Third, the customer support. Perhaps the most important point in the final decision making was the quality of the direct customer support. I want to make this very clear, this support was exceptional. From the beginning, we never felt like we were being fobbed off as one of many. We received the right solution to every question immediately. We haven't experienced that with other tools, so the decision to use COMMITLY was almost a "no-brainer" for me. 

And why lexoffice, what makes it the tool of choice for automated online accounting for you? 

As with everything I do, I look at different solutions on the market and check to what extent it meets my requirements. With lexoffice, it was mainly the intuitiveness of the tool in use. I also find it unprecedented how lexoffice works with the categories, e.g. the easy assignment of positions to categories, but also the overview of all categories. I like that very much. Very helpful of course also the good combination with the app. 

All functions are really nicely solved. In my case, the very attractive start-up conditions of lexoffice were even more decisive. lexoffice offered me 12 months free of charge at that time. It was a good incentive and thus a very conscious decision. And it was a good decision, because I am still absolutely satisfied with lexoffice. 

What was the motivation to connect your Lexoffice account with COMMITLY? 

We use lexoffice for all our invoicing, among other things. I can see all of our customers' one-off and installment payments there. Thanks to the connection and the corresponding export/import function, I can automatically transfer all these items to my COMMITLY Cash flow planning and don't have to manually check and enter the status of my open items. This saves me an incredible amount of time. 

By mapping my actual bank inputs and outputs via the PSD2 interface, I have a daily updated overview of my actual Cash position, with corresponding changes being automatically incorporated into the forecast. This works really well. 

How did the linking of lexoffice with COMMIITLY work, what was necessary for this and how time-consuming was this? 

Honestly, I can only remember darkly. You only have to go to integrations in the COMMITLY settings, click a button for "connect lexoffice" and log in to lexoffice as usual. That's it. And as I said, especially since I can hardly remember it, it must have worked flawlessly (laughs). 

How can you imagine the workflow between the two tools in practice? 

Also for the current operation it is most important for me to have the open items up-to-date and available at a glance. For this I have to click in COMMITLY on "load lexoffice invoices", the synchronization then runs through automatically and without problems.  

This is particularly important for us when we receive queries from customers or when investment decisions have to be made. Here, it is crucial to have up-to-date figures. In this case, this means that the bank data and the open items list are synchronized. This workflow works really well and takes very little time. 

Do you like anything in particular about COMMITLY?

For example, there is the categorization. What I particularly like about COMMITLY is the standard template that comes with it. Very little manual configuration was necessary, because COMMITLY a very good foundation. I also find the optical preparation great, I am very satisfied.

What I also like very much are the liquidity scenarios, the easy creation of such scenarios and the possibility to run through different scenarios and get them visualized in the dashboard. That is really well implemented in my opinion.

Very helpful for me is that I can create several companies separately, but also automatically consolidate them with the associated lexoffice accounting and open items via COMMITLY, so that I always have a daily overview. This helps me manage the different companies and at the same time shows me where we stand in total. Very important for me.

Also very useful for my needs at Pro.Tec Solutions is the access control, which is very nicely solved in COMMITLY. It allows me to assign different employees individual rights and access to specific companies or accounts linked to them. This allows me to provide transparency of liquidity information for different groups specifically and with different depth of information. After all, not everyone should be able to see everything all the time. This is really a super functionality and helps me immensely in my use-case. Otherwise I would have to work with multiple accounts, which would be tedious.

In your experience, where does COMMITLY have room for improvement? 

What I sometimes wish I could do is create the liquidity scenarios longer than 12 months, that would help us a lot.

Chris from COMMITLY: ... You can extend the forecast itself up to 5 years in the settings.

Alex- Ah, I didn't know that at all, I obviously overlooked it until now, that's of course very good (laughs). 

It would be nice if I could simply move items in my schedule if they are delayed, for example, without having to delete and re-enter them.

Chris ... this can be easily done in COMMITLY by assigning the corresponding budget or position to a new date with a click. The adjustment of the planning is then automated.

Alex- I haven't even tried that yet, but glad I did because it will save me a lot of work and time again (laughs again). 

Well, then actually only one wish remains regarding installment payments for open invoices. Case study: A customer decides to purchase one of our services for EUR 10,000. He also negotiates a down payment of EUR 3,000 and an installment payment of the remaining amount spread over 3 years. When I connect lexoffice to COMMITLY, I see the invoice amount. So far so good. Now if I want to use this amount in my scenario planning, then so far I still have to manually distribute the balance (i.e. minus the down payment) over the remaining period. This is not time-consuming, because I only have to enter the partial amount once and then select the repetition frequency (e.g. monthly).

But of course it would be even better if the information about the installment payment could be transferred automatically and processed accordingly in Cash flow planning . Not a must-have for me, but certainly a nice-to-have. (Note from the COMMITLY support team: this feature has already been requested several times by customers, is already on the roadmap and will soon be available for all customers). 

And maybe the sales tax: What would be cool, if I could enter the corresponding sales tax rate for the positions. Currently I solve this in COMMITLY via a rule that assigns the percentages to the positions, and then takes into account with 1 month delay e.g. 19% sales tax. 

Would you recommend the two tools COMMITLY and lexoffice? 

Yes, absolutely. Both tools are essential to my business management and part of my business decision making. Especially when you combine them. You have to try it out for yourself and develop a routine. Then you can't imagine your everyday entrepreneurial life without it. And I would like to emphasize again: the personal support at COMMITLY was and is really exceptional. 

Thank you very much for your time! 

Credits: Photos by Pro:Tex Solutions