Clockwork Review: Features, Integration and Pricing 2023

Clockwork is a tool revolutionizing how businesses improve the accuracy, speed, and value of their financial planning and analysis. While working with accounting data, many businesses struggle with data accuracy, cost reduction, and predictive analytics. These often lead to inefficiencies, errors, and limitations in their financial management processes. 

Clockwork seeks to help financial firms enhance complex financial analysis, enable efficient scenario planning, automate time-consuming tasks, and more. By harnessing this AI-powered FP&A software, identifying cost-saving opportunities and optimizing your business’s financial resources becomes a piece of cake. 

And guess what? The platform provides features essential for improving client retention and increasing your average revenue per client. Therefore, this article offers a complete Clockwork review. It discusses Clockwork’s features, pricing, and terms of service to ascertain its investment merit for your finance firm or department.

Clockwork Overview

Clockwork aims to help companies amass abundant data to make better decisions and contribute to strategic planning. Rather than face data fragmentation when performing financial analysis, the software is a game changer. It lets businesses pull data from various sources to accurately view their financial information. 

Fady Hawatmeh, Clockwork’s founder, created the tool to bridge the gap between hustling entrepreneurs and simple financial data. As a former CFO, he strategically positioned Clockwork to shape the financial direction of a company, leveraging AI to enhance budgeting and forecasting.

Unlike many existing financial planning and analysis tools, which are challenging to deploy, Clockwork believes you shouldn’t need a Ph.D. or employ a tech expert to implement your financial planning software. As a result, it provides a collaborative platform for businesses to get 24/7 real-time visibility into their financial data and plan their cash flow. 

Since its inception in 2018, the company has helped many individuals without financial experience balance their checkbooks. Clockwork is excellent for business owners, finance professionals, consultants, and bookkeepers. 

The platform provides every functionality necessary for upselling your advisory services for clients. Renowned clients like Withum Audit Tax Advisory, Go Figure Accounting, and General Cents Accounting have found the software helpful in managing data for financial projections.  

• Established: 2018
• Founder:  Fady Hawatmeh
• Office: United States (Headquarters)

5 Core Features of the Clockwork

Expert Opinion

Rating: 4.7/5

Clockwork is an AI financial planning and analysis software that helps companies utilize financial and non-financial data to know their performance with predictive modeling, cash flow forecasting, and scenario planning features. 

We found Clockwork helpful for completing complex financial tasks without little to no hassle for someone with not-so-vast financial expertise. The AI-powered FP&A software enabled us to view financial projections and predict business outcomes. 

For example, the tool’s reporting analytics let you know how much cash you have left in your bank account and your liquidity ratios in real time. As a result, we could focus on creating new revenue streams.

One area of challenge, however, maybe with the scenario manager and customized formula features. Here, users with limited financial knowledge may need help maximizing the software’s functionalities. The company makes up for that with its responsive customer support, ready to help you whenever you encounter a challenge.

For businesses trying to make critical decisions, the tool’s scenario planning may be helpful to anticipate and prepare for various outcomes. The advantage that provides is that you can reduce the impact of unforeseen events on your financial performance. 

Another feature we liked was its financial modeling. Through this, we could create budgets, allocate resources effectively, and ensure our financial plans align with business goals.

We found Clockwork’s pricing relatively high for simplifying a business’s financial planning and analysis. Even though the software has proven it offers value, small and medium companies may face budgetary constraints to leverage the features it provides fully. 

Overall, the platform is excellent for tracking and forecasting revenue, income, customer acquisition cost (CAC), cash burn, working capital ratio, and more from a single dashboard. With it, automating routine financial tasks to allow your finance team to focus on strategic analysis and value-added activities becomes child’s play.

Clockwork Notable Features

Clockwork provides users with all the features necessary to reap the benefits of financial planning. The software makes it easy to track and forecast revenue, stay up-to-date on financial information, and handle larger volumes of data. The following are Clockwork’s notable features:

1. Financial Dashboard

To determine your business’s financial health in seconds, it’s essential you utilize a dashboard that offers instant visibility. Clockwork’s dashboard helps you enhance your financial planning, as it provides a visual representation of your key financial metrics and performance. With it, you can avoid data silos and ensure access to accurate financial information. 

The platform automatically breaks down your revenue trend, net cash flow, cash forecast, and margin trend to identify areas for improvement. In fact, it serves as a blueprint for planning business growth. And the fun part is you can customize the dashboard to suit your company’s needs.

Instead of relying on lengthy reports, Clockwork’s financial dashboard offers a concise overview of your cash in real-time. This feature is particularly valuable in fast-paced business environments where quick decisions are essential. The tool’s use of charts, graphs, and other visual elements makes it easy for individuals without financial backgrounds to understand your business’s performance.

2. Financial Modelling

You need to go beyond traditional approaches like historical analysis and discounted cash flow to enhance your business’s financial accuracy. For this reason, Clockwork provides tools for creating, optimizing, and analyzing your financial models. This feature lets you do away with the stress of manually inputting data and creating formulas within Excel spreadsheets. 

Clockwork gathers data and uses AI algorithms to enable predictive modeling. This way, your company can forecast financial scenarios based on current trends. You’ll appreciate its online financial model templates for upscaling your business and getting a clear picture of your growth projections. 

Considering that the platform syncs with your financial system automatically, you’ll also find it simple to analyze your historical transactions, generate a baseline forecast, and stay up-to-date with the latest trends and results. As a financial planning and analytics software, Clockwork’s financial modeling gives accurate insights to help businesses achieve their goals.

3. Cash Flow Forecasting

Many companies only review their cash flow during the end of the year. However, Clockwork lets you break down your cash flow weekly to optimize liquidity management. The software ensures that your cash flow forecasts are based on accurate information. That enables you to avoid surprises, as you can precisely identify where your funds will come from and go to at several points in the future.

Besides, your bank account balance can only do so much in predicting your future cash flow. As a result, Clockwork’s forecasting feature offers an unprecedented level of visibility to meet your business’s growing demands proactively. The platform can evaluate a full year’s cash flow, a week at a time.

4. Custom Metrics

Clockwork offers metrics for making business decisions and understanding your business’s financial health. The software tracks KPIs like revenue growth, profit margins, working capital, cost of goods sold, and more. There’s no need to handle dispersed data, input manual formulas, or build charts, as Clockwork provides a unified dashboard to view them in one place.

Thanks to its customizable metrics, you can import non-financial data and measure every aspect of your business. That means the tool is not a one-size-fits-all, allowing you to include metrics specific to your company. During financial planning, you can rely on Clockwork for error-free metrics rather than deal with missing data, misreported numbers, and broken formulas.

5. Scenario Planning

When managing financial data, you will likely encounter multiple “What-if” questions to make better decisions. Luckily, Clockwork comes with a scenario writer that lets you view how different assumptions, decisions, or best/worst-case situations will impact your finances from the top-to-bottom. Once you subscribe to the platform, you can build new scenarios for revenue, cost of goods sold (COGS), and operating expenses assumptions. 

This feature has a summary page to review how expenses, cash flows, and income differ between your scenario and the main baseline financial model. This way, you can assess the full impact of the event or decision your scenario represents.

Keep in mind that running a business requires you to be ready to encounter risks. Clockwork helps to assess potential risks associated with each scenario, providing insights into the likelihood and impact of various risks. In other words, the tool supports risk mitigation and decision-making.

Clockwork Integrations

You can seamlessly integrate Clockwork with Xero and QuickBooks Online. These integrations make it easy to pull data, ensuring that your financial planning and analysis are based on accurate information. As changes occur in Xero and QuickBooks, Clockwork will automatically update relevant metrics like income and expenses. This eliminates the need for manual data entry or importing/exporting files. 

All you need to do is sync Clockwork with these accounting systems. Doing this enables the FP&A software to analyze your transactions consistently to train the forecasting AI, drive financial models, and provide key performance insights in real time. Considering it’s a one-way authorization, Clockwork can’t change the data in your accounting system.

Plans and Pricing

Clockwork is ideal for freelancers, small businesses, medium businesses, and large enterprises. The platform offers free plans, including a free package for users to gain visibility into their finances and cash flow. You don’t need to sign up with your credit card to explore its free trial for 14 days. Financial planning and analysis software available plan includes:

1. Free Plan

As the name implies, this plan is entirely free. And guess what? It has no limit! You can subscribe to Clockwork to get custom five-year financial projections for your business without paying a dime. Subscribing to this plan gives you access to real-time models, a financial health dashboard, and 18 standard metrics.

Features:

• Custom 5-year financial projections for 12 months 
•  AI-powered baseline forecasts and automatic account mapping
• Real-time financial metrics
• Monthly cash flow forecast
• Budget vs. Actual variance

Pricing:

The Free plan is free.

2. Insight Plan

This plan is ideal for companies who want complete control over their finances. Rather than outsource an accountant or bookkeeper, you can use Clockwork’s Insight plan to deliver impeccable client experiences. 

Unlike the free plan, it offers subscribers an intelligent five-year financial model. You can outline your business’s projected financial performance, including income, expenses, cash flow, and profits over five years.

Features:

• Weekly cash flow forecast
• Customizable 12-month cash flow forecast with Invoice 
• Driver-based forecasting
• Upcoming or overdue invoice and bill manager
• Forecast vs. actual variance

Pricing:

The Insight plan is $159 per month.

3. Predict Plan

If you want to upscale your business and improve cash flow, Clockwork’s Predict plan is an outstanding pick. With it, you can access unlimited custom metrics with non-financial data import. Considering that the plan provides users with the necessary features to create the most accurate financial model for their business, it’s Clockwork’s most popular package.

Features:

• Custom financial and non-financial metrics
• Unlimited custom forecasting assumptions
• Custom cash timing rules for deferred revenue and expense planning
• Export models to Excel
• Unlimited users with custom access levels

Pricing:

The Predict plan is $399 per month.

4. Ultimate Plan

Clockwork tailors this plan for intricate and large enterprises. Subscribing to its Ultimate package gives highly personalized assistance and prioritized support. It comes with every feature in the Predict plan, including a payroll system integration. That means you can combine your payroll system with Clockwork to eliminate manual data entry, reduce errors, and enhance the overall efficiency of managing payroll-related processes.

Features:

• Priority support and implementation
• Dedicated Clockwork Coach
• Co-branded marketing material
• Product roadmap insight
• Custom financial and non-financial metrics

Pricing:

The Predict plan is $639 per month.

Clockwork Plan & Features Comparison Table

Features	Free	Insight	Predict	Ultimate
Budget vs. Actual variance	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Custom 5-Year Financial Projections	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Monthly Cash Flow Forecast	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Forecast vs. Actual variance	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Unlimited Users with Custom Access Levels	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Export Models to Excel	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Custom Cash Timing Rules	No	No	Yes	Yes
Unlimited “what if” Scenarios	No	No	Yes	Yes
Dedicated Clockwork Coach	No	No	No	Yes
Product Roadmap Insight	No	No	No	Yes

Terms and Policies

Once you access Clockwork, you automatically agree to its terms of service. The company commits itself to maintaining your privacy, as it doesn’t share your personal information with third parties. Note that you’re not liable for a refund during your subscription term. The platform only allows users to cancel their subscription, meaning it won’t debit you for subsequent months. 

When you use Clockwork, the platform collects personal information like your name, company information, personal or company email address, phone number, or other contact information. The software uses this information to solicit feedback and send product updates, but it’s entirely up to you to provide Clockwork with your personal information. 

However, you can’t restrict the company from collecting confidential business information, such as financial and administrative data about your company, as it requires them to provide the best possible service. 

Persons below the age of 16 cannot enjoy Clockwork’s services. Regarding termination, the company reserves the right to suspend your use of its product if you engage in activities that violate its terms.

Customer Support

Clockwork has dedicated and responsive customer support to walk users through complex financial planning processes. The platform’s customer support staff are very attentive and can put you through any request in real time. When you visit its website, you’ll notice a pop-up live chat, prompting you to explore its features. 

To reduce its learning curve, Clockwork provides users with multiple resources. On the website, you’ll find client testimonials, blog posts, and FAQs to help you understand and utilize the software effectively. Like many SaaS tools, the platform has service distinction in its customer support. 
Clockwork software provides ultimate subscribers with a unique and personalized experience. For example, these individuals get a dedicated coach, making their onboarding process smooth. They can also access an expert team to dial in their custom assumptions, scenarios, metrics, and more. For inquiries, you can reach out to the company via its email channel at hello@clockwork.ai.

Conclusion

Clockwork is vital for businesses seeking to enhance their financial planning, analysis, and decision-making process. Introducing this software to your accounting systems helps eliminate tasks leading to delays in generating financial insights. 

It eliminates the doubt when conducting challenging scenario analysis by helping you model different situations and make better decisions in response to changing conditions. With it, you won’t need to worry about errors in your financial data.

Want to unlock the power of seamless financial planning? You can check Clockwork’s free trial without commitment to evaluate its features in your business environment. 

Contributors: Yinka ODUFOTE (Technical Writer); Eyimofe ADEWOLE (Graphic Designer)