Despite
the enormous enthusiasm and determination with which small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs) usually launch their initiatives, most fail to survive the first three years of life. Many of these ventures fail due to poor financial management. . That is what happened to young Bolivian Omaira Saucedo. She started a company and began to record her finances in a paper notebook, until one day the notebook disappeared. And while there are more advanced approaches, such as spreadsheets, each person enters data in his or her own style but this can result in a financial Tower of Babel that makes it difficult to manage the business.
To solve these problems, Saucedo created tuGerente, software that integrates and automates the collection of financial information for small businesses and helps them make more informed decisions to grow and invest. Thanks to this creation that facilitates entrepreneurship, Saucedo has been chosen by MIT Technology Review in Spanish as one of the winners of Innovators under 35 Latin America 2020.
tuGerente allows users to manage purchases, sales, expenses and inventory in a single place, where all the company's financial information is consolidated. "We standardize the way of recording information. tuGerente is software that channels and integrates different sources of information," its creator explains.
tuGerente also includes a randomization algorithm for inventory management that allows you to detect theft early, reducing your customers' losses. Finally, the software suggests sales, which improves revenue. With this approach, she explains that she is trying to solve "the lack of control that generally exists in SME finances, because the 80% of SMEs that do not survive the first three years fail because they take too long to realize that the numbers are not going well."
But, in addition to simplifying their finances, the young Bolivian also seeks to improve the financial culture of SMEs in order to facilitate their access to credit, since they normally have less favorable conditions because they cannot demonstrate their solvency. "We are working with a major Bolivian bank to facilitate financial inclusion thanks to the fact that their information is organized by tuGerente. This allows them to demonstrate their numbers to financial institutions and continue to grow. We want to help SMEs enter the financial world," Saucedo explains.
Saucedo's innovation is already helping more than 500 SMEs and is expanding in Latin America. The innovator is also looking for large companies to subsidize the software for microenterprises that cannot afford some of its features. This way, more SMEs can benefit from her solution.
The director of the Incubation and Business Support department at the Poznan Science and Technology Park (Poland) and member of the Innovators under 35 Latin America 2020 jury, Anna Tórz, considers tuGerente to be "a solution with a lot of commercial potential" and with the capacity "to have an impact on the survival rate of SMEs."
