CAFIN TALKS: Michal Belan on Symfio

In episode 73 of the CAFIN TALKS podcast, Mirek Umlauf talks with Michal Belan, founder of the fintech company Symfio, about why Symfio was created and what companies lack most in financial management today. Michal describes how, as a CFO, he spent a long time looking for a tool that would bring reporting, planning and control together into one working whole – but in practice kept running into finance being managed through a combination of spreadsheets, exports and manual adjustments. It was this experience that led him to decide to build Symfio “from scratch” based on real data and processes from dozens of companies.

One of the key ideas of the conversation revolves around accounting, which Michal calls a “sacred place”. Not because it is flawless, but because it is the firmest point a company can rely on when it wants to be sure the numbers match reality. If reporting and planning are built on parallel calculations outside the accounts, several versions of the truth quickly appear – and instead of making decisions, finance deals with reconciling and explaining why someone gets a different number. According to Michal, the link to accounting is not a technical detail but the foundation of trust: when the data adds up and the methodology is consistent, the company can be run without constant “manual firefighting”.

The episode also offers a realistic view of Excel. It is still dominant and in many situations works brilliantly – it is fast, flexible and accessible. The problem comes when it starts standing in for a system: when exports are assembled in it, versions maintained, tables copied and the same things fixed again every period. What saves time at first turns into a brake and a risk as the company grows. This is exactly where Symfio builds its value: not another piece of “extra” software, but a methodology for scalable financial management that holds one financial reality and takes away routine, not control. According to Michal, a well-set-up process and connection to accounting can save companies hundreds of hours of work, because repetitive tasks are no longer done by hand and finance can focus on what matters – interpretation, scenarios and decisions.

The episode is just under 30 minutes long and offers a quick, practical look at how modern corporate finance should work when a company grows and no longer wants to run the business on patched-together spreadsheets and guesswork about the numbers.

Listen to the podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3EcRizem8zzIOBOQtk0mJr?si=ThFtOdnXRpSTEcVKxl1abw&nd=1&dlsi=e46b6a669f154a11