Author: Hasan Can Soygök, Founder, Remotify.co
There is a growing disconnect between the people who manage money on paper and the people who manage it in practice. Finance professionals spend their careers building accurate reports and refining dashboards. Yet across industries, the operators and small business owners who handle money every day keep arriving at the same conclusion: the finance world is solving the wrong problems.
The gap is not about intelligence or training. It is about proximity. The person coding an invoice at 6am before a shift starts experiences finance differently than the person reviewing a quarterly P&L from a corner office.
Cash flow kills more businesses than bad products ever will
Profitability and cash flow are fundamentally different things, yet most financial tools treat them as interchangeable. A business can show a healthy margin on every job and still run out of cash on a Tuesday afternoon. Roughly 82% of small business failures trace back to cash flow mismanagement which should reshape how fintech products are designed from the ground up.
The operators who live this reality understand it in ways that finance professionals rarely do. In construction, materials are purchased weeks before a client pays. Hospitality operators watch food costs spike overnight while menu prices stay fixed because raising them risks losing regulars. Steel distributors face a different version of the same problem: the price of stock on the day you buy it might bear no resemblance to the price on the day payment clears. The margin only becomes real when the cash lands in the account, and that timing gap is where businesses survive or collapse.
Most accounting software treats a sale as a completed event. However, for the person running the business, a sale is the start of a waiting game. The invoice goes out today. Payment might arrive in 30, 60, or 90 days depending on the industry. Meanwhile, wages still need paying and the next job still needs funding.
When official tools fail, shadow spreadsheets take over
Every organisation has two financial systems. The official one sits inside the ERP or accounting platform. The unofficial one lives in personal spreadsheets and workaround tools that employees build because the official system does not match how work happens. This is not laziness. It is a rational response to tools designed for auditors rather than for the people entering data on the ground.
The data supports this pattern. Around 94% of business spreadsheets contain faults, and roughly half of all models at midsize companies carry errors significant enough to distort results. Yet employees continue building these flawed workarounds because the alternative, rigid compliance-first software, feels even worse.
The problem compounds in industries where the person recording the transaction is also managing twelve other priorities. A restaurant manager juggling a busy Friday night service is not going to stop and correctly code an expense in a system that requires five clicks and a dropdown menu with 40 categories. Instead, they write it on a napkin and deal with it later. By Monday, the napkin is gone. By the end of the quarter, the financials reflect a version of reality that nobody on the floor would recognise.
Finance teams often respond to this problem by adding tighter controls: more approval steps, mandatory fields, and training sessions on how to use the software properly. However, tighter controls do not fix a usability problem. They make it worse. The operators who abandon official systems are not doing so out of ignorance. They are doing it because the system costs them more time than it saves.
Fintech keeps answering questions nobody on the floor is asking
The fintech industry has invested billions into building better dashboards, faster payment rails, and smarter automation. Yet analytics adoption across organisations has been stuck at roughly 25% of employees for over seven years. The tools exist. People are just not using them.
The reason is straightforward. Most fintech products are designed to answer the question “what happened?” when the person on the floor needs to answer “what should I do right now?” A hospitality manager does not need a labour cost trend report from last quarter. They need to know whether they can afford to roster an extra server tonight. A tradesperson does not need a cash flow forecast for the next 12 months. They need to know whether approving a materials order right now will put Friday’s payroll at risk.
This is not a technology gap. It is a design philosophy gap. Fintech products are overwhelmingly built by finance people for finance people. The interfaces assume familiarity with financial terminology. The outputs assume the reader knows what to do with the information. And the onboarding processes assume the user has time to learn a new platform while also running a business.
The operators and small business owners who drive the economy do not need prettier reports. They need clear, real-time answers to simple operational questions. The fintech company that figures out how to deliver those answers at the speed of a decision on a job site will unlock a market the entire industry has been overlooking.
Until then, the shop floor will keep knowing things the spreadsheet never will.