Yoga with Ainhoa and Brixx
Ainhoa has utilised Brixx to help forecast and model her financial future.
Who is Yoga with Ainhoa?
Ainhoa has been teaching full time as a qualified yoga teacher since 2017 on a self-employed/sole trader basis. She has plans to move to a limited company structure in the future.
Prior to the pandemic, Ainhoa taught classes on a one-to-one basis and also in groups, often teaching for other yoga studios as required.
As with many businesses, the pandemic changed the way that Ainhoa worked. Unable to use her existing premises for teaching, Ainhoa spent a valuable six months assessing all aspects of her business and knew that she needed to switch to teaching online.
How could Ainhoa make the move to online teaching?
With increasing overhead costs she positioned her company as an online boutique yoga studio, with some in person ad-hoc classes for other yoga studios as required. Starting with a handful of students, and an association her long-standing relationship with a well known west London yoga school (where she qualified), Ainhoa gradually built her client base.
With this shift in service delivery, also came a different way of looking at her finances. Ainhoa’s clients pay for classes in varying ways, some pay for classes in advance, some pay on the day, and she was questioning the viability of some of her classes.
Ainhoa knew she needed to keep a much closer eye on her cashflow, and have a really clear picture of her finances. She knew she needed to look to the future to ensure that the cash was available to meet her obligations.
Although as a sole trader, on paper, the financials appeared simple, however individual items and differing payment terms soon added up to give a more complex picture.
What could Ainhoa do to better manage cashflow?
Teaching full time allowed little time to focus on her accounts – and with no background in finance, Ainhoa knew she needed some help. As her company moves towards limited status, she knows the processes and financial obligations will become much more complicated.
She did a lot of research and found Crunch, and had a call with one of their accountants. Through Crunch, she was introduced to Brixx’s financial modelling tool, and started using the app in September 2022, and was really pleased that she did as ‘it is really fantastic’.
Brixx has enabled Ainhoa to forecast not only her future income, but also her fixed and adhoc costs, factoring in tax returns etc and ensuring that there is adequate provision to meet her obligations.
She is now sharing her Brixx plans with her accountant and finds it a really collaborative way of working with them.
How did Brixx help Ainhoa?
With an eye on expanding the company, Ainhoa used Brixx to build a plan, and was able to send the bank a professional and robust profit and loss (P&L) and budget and forecast when applying for a business loan.
Ainhoa said it was fantastic to be able to use Brixx for this process, giving her great confidence as her application looked very professional, and made a huge difference to her credibility being able to show a year of actuals, present and projected future figures using the Crunch and Brixx integration. She was able to demonstrate clearly any loan payments that had been made, and how much of that loan was outstanding.
‘It was a really nice exercise to see with my own eyes how the money flows in and out of the business’.
Ainhoa found Brixx very intuitive and was able to pick it up quickly. She was able to see where figures were coming from in her reports as it wasn’t just a black box. The couple of questions that she did have were dealt with quickly by the Brixx Support Team.
What kept Ainhoa using Brixx?
The functionality that gives the ability to move items in time, and updates all the underlying reports immediately and automatically, was the key element that really kept Ainhoa hooked.
She wants to understand those ‘what if’ questions – she has a lot of students that change their classes and sometimes payments are later than initially agreed and she needs to understand the financial impact of all these changes. She is now able to look at scenarios in order to make up for any forecasted shortfall.
The adhoc classes that Ainhoa runs for other studios can now be evaluated with costs being compared to the income that they generate, and whether it would be more beneficial to take on a new student or another group class instead. She can run different scenarios and show how it affects her finances.
The absolute winner for Ainhoa was that if her subscription lapses, all her data is retained. She could pick up exactly where she left off, without having to spend time re-inputting the figures. As Brixx offers both monthly and annual subscriptions, it offers flexibility in usage and price points. Ainhoa currently benefits from the flexibility of the monthly subscription, but long term will be subscribing annually
Would Ainhoa recommend Brixx?
Brixx and Crunch give Ainhoa an important part of her ‘business toolbox’, and will be using it long term. She can now run her business effectively, and can see very clearly what the financial future looks like, and if she needs to pivot her business accordingly.
Ainhoa loves the flexibility that Brixx gives her, and will be continuing to use it to help with her journey of moving from a sole trader to a limited company. She has already recommended it to friends.
