FinFlow 360° — SME Survival Intelligence Engine

FinFlow 360° Dashboard — Business Weather Score (7.5/100, Low Risk ☀️) with 6-month Cash Flow trend showing inflow, and net cash flow.
Interactive Cash Flow Chart with hover tooltip — showing January 2026 breakdown: Inflow ₹12.5L, Net ₹8.2L, Outflow ₹4.3L. Risk Factor
FinFlow 360° Dashboard — Business Weather Score with 6-month Cash Flow trend showing inflow, outflow, and net cash flow.
Peer Benchmark — You vs Retail Sector Burn Rate 36% vs 73% peers, Profit Margin 64% vs 18% peers

Inspiration

63 million SMEs in India operate without real-time financial visibility. Most business owners discover cash flow problems only when it's too late — leading to avoidable failures. We wanted to build something that acts like an always-on CFO for small businesses, giving them the same financial intelligence that large corporations take for granted.

The idea of a "business weather forecast" came naturally — just like you check the weather before stepping out, an SME owner should be able to check their business health every morning before making decisions.

What We Built

FinFlow 360° is a real-time SME survival intelligence dashboard with five core engines:

Business Weather Score — a single 0-100 risk score with weather metaphor (Sunny → Hurricane)
Cash Flow Forecasting — 30/60/90 day projections using Facebook Prophet ML model trained on 18 months of transaction data
Storm Alerts — detects dangerous financial patterns before they become crises (high burn rate, declining revenue, low cash runway)
Macro Pulse — tracks RBI interest rates, inflation, GDP growth, fuel prices, and MSME policy sentiment using live news analysis
Peer Benchmarking — compares your burn rate, profit margin, receivables, and revenue against anonymized sector averages

How We Built It

Backend: Python FastAPI serving a REST API with four modules:

Facebook Prophet for time-series cash flow forecasting with custom Indian salary cycle seasonality
Scikit-learn weighted multi-factor risk scoring engine (8 financial factors)
NewsAPI + TextBlob for macro economic sentiment analysis
SQLAlchemy + SQLite for transaction and benchmark data

Frontend: React + Tailwind CSS + Recharts for a dark-mode financial dashboard with interactive bar charts, area charts, and radar charts.

Deployment: Backend on Render, Frontend on Vercel.

Challenges We Faced

Prophet on Windows — Stan backend installation issues required switching to CmdStanPy
Macro sentiment without paid APIs — Built a graceful fallback to demo mode so the app works even without a live NewsAPI key
Realistic seed data — Generated 18 months of synthetic transactions with growth trends, seasonality, and realistic Indian business patterns