EY Finance Navigator FAQ

No, unfortunately not. If you would like to get some more info though on our software before purchasing, you can check out our features page, short product tour video, insights page or half-an-hour webinar video. In addition, feel free to reach out to thefinancenavigator@nl.ey.com or your local EY advisor/contact person for your questions or a personal Skype demo of our tool.

No, when your access period has expired, access to your account is automatically blocked. No hidden costs, no automatic renewals. After your account has expired you simply select a new access period, check out and continue working with your existing data. After your account expires your data remains available for one year, meaning you can leave Finance Navigator for a couple of months, come back later and continue working with your existing data (as long as you come back within one year).

EY Finance Navigator is a SaaS platform owned by EY Advisory Netherlands LLP. As EY Advisory Netherlands LLP is a professional financial services provider, we are obliged by Dutch/EU anti-money laundering regulations to identify and verify all of our customers. Identification and verification for EY Finance Navigator is done by means of this 25 cents verification payment. For clients in most countries the verification payment is a required step in our onboarding process. For some countries we will ask for a copy of your passport to perform the required identification/verification. If you sign up for our software this will all be self-explanatory.

Please be aware the 25 cents verification payment is non-refundable.

We recommend you use: Internet Explorer (version 10>), Windows Edge (12 or higher), Google Chrome (55 or higher), Firefox (50 or higher), Safari (9 or higher), IOS (versions 10, 9), Android (versions 7, 6 and 5), Windows Phone (versions 8 & 8.1)

No, with our current version you can only have access for one dedicated e-mail address. So multiple users for the same account are not supported at the moment. You can share an e-mail address with multiple people though and work in our application at the same time.

If you are logging in and you are redirected to select an access plan and pay, it means that your former access period has expired and you now need to buy a new access period (when this is your first time access you need to checkout before you can log in). Once you complete the payment you will have access to your existing data and can continue working from where you left off.

Purchasing EY Finance Navigator does not work according to a subscription model. You simply pay for an access period and when this period ends your account is blocked automatically. In other words: you just have to wait until your access period has expired. If you still want to cancel your account before the expiration date, or want to make sure your data is deleted as of now, then please drop us a note at thefinancenavigator@nl.ey.com.

Yes, we take data privacy and security very serious. EY Finance Navigator is GDPR compliant, hosted on secure Microsoft Azure servers in Amsterdam and our technical support and information security teams make sure our application is always up to date with the latest security principles. Our application includes SSL encryption to keep data safe and data is not shared with any other 3rd parties except for the ones mentioned in our Privacy Statement (i.e. Microsoft for hosting purposes and Ingenico for online payment purposes). All EY personnel and any 3rd parties which EY engages to process your personal data are obliged to respect the confidentiality of your data. EY will not sell, distribute or lease your personal data to third parties (other than the two mentioned above) unless we have your permission or are required by law to do so.

Investors typically want to know the size of the market you are addressing. The TAM/SAM/SOM approach will help you break down your market size into the Total Addressable Market (TAM: the total market on global scale), Serviceable Available Market (SAM: the market reachable for you from geographical & niche perspective) and the Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM: the market share of SAM you capture, in other words: your sales target).

Example
Say you have a company selling running shoes for kids in the US. Then you could segment the three markets as follows:

• TAM: total global running shoes market. Estimated global size of $21.41 billion by 2021.
• SAM: the US kids’ running shoes market is the serviceable market since your company focuses on kids (niche focus) and the US (geographic focus). Estimated at $5.3 billion by 2021.
• SOM: target market is $107 million. This is the market we expect to capture with our solution. This $107 million equals your sales target by 2021.

In the EY Finance Navigator application you can add your market size details in your scenario settings. 

First have a good look whether you really cannot add your business model to the ‘Product/service’ or ‘Subscription’ categories. After adding a projection using these categories you can edit the data in the table that is generated in several ways. In this way you can mimic many different business models (see the question ‘How do I edit data that I have added to my financial forecast?’). If this does not work you can use the revenue forecast category ‘Other’, which allows you to enter revenue on a monthly basis without having to use a specific business model.

COGS are costs that are directly attributable to the production of goods sold (or services performed) by a company. For SaaS companies COGS are different compared to ‘normal’ businesses as there is no regular production or service delivery process involved. However, also SaaS companies definitely incur COGS! A well performing SaaS company typically has a Gross Margin of 80-90% or even higher, meaning that on average about 10-20% of revenues are spent on COGS. Several examples of COGS for SaaS business models can be found below and you can add them to the Finance Navigator software either on monthly basis or based on the numbers of units sold for the revenue streams you have created.

• Hosting costs
• Customer support costs
• Customer onboarding costs
• Fees of third-party software of integrations

At the moment it is not possible yet to edit growth rates you have used when entering your financial projections in the Finance Navigator software. You create financial projections by adding data into the different input pages (see the question ‘How do I create financial projections?’). Most of the projections are calculated based on the growth rate you enter. After adding the projection to your forecast, you cannot change this growth rate anymore. However, you can edit data by following the process described in the question ‘How do I edit data that I have added to my financial forecast?’

To get to 100% completeness you will need to unlock all widgets in your dashboard, complete your company profile and scenario settings and read all the notifications triggered in the message center.

Three types of notifications are presented in Finance Navigator’s ‘Notifications’ menu item.

1. Messages showing a red exclamation mark: these are triggered only after you have filled out data and have pressed the ‘Analyze plan’ button. The messages itself will inform you on what has triggered the message and will provide you with information on what action to take.
2. Messages showing a blue star icon: these are triggered when you unlock new widgets or look at certain screens (such as the financial statements) in our tool for the first time. These messages explain the different financial metrics shown in your dashboard.
3. Messages showing a green tick mark icon: this icon is shown for messages that were triggered when you clicked the ‘Analyze plan’ button (with a red exclamation mark icon), but that are now “resolved”. As the messages with the red exclamation mark are triggered by your data inputs, you can solve them by updating your data so that they are not applicable anymore. If that happens, you have cleared the message and they switch from a red exclamation mark icon to a green tick mark icon.

Yes, you can. However, at the moment you cannot compare these to your forecast yet (“budget vs. actuals tracking”). In your scenario settings you can change the start year of your projection. You can change this year to the year of your preference (in the past) so you can show your historical performance for past years as well. As you can build a 5-or 10 year forecast with EY Finance Navigator there are still more than enough future years for you to forecast. At the moment we are working on a new functionality allowing you to add historical (actual) data to you forecast to compare your budget to your actuals.

For sure! Our tool also offers a built-in export functionality. Click the ‘Export’ button in your dashboard or the ‘Export plan’ button in your scenario overview screen and an Excel export of your complete financial forecast is automatically generated. The export includes your company profile and scenario settings data, the data in your input sheets (including free text assumptions) and your complete financial statements (on both monthly as well as yearly basis). Currently not part of the export are the notifications and dashboard items. We are currently working on an export functionality of the dashboard as well.