Andromeda Training is a business acumen training company with clients throughout the world — including here in Saudi Arabia. The company offers Income/Outcome business simulations, which are essentially facilitator-led workshops built around a board game business simulation that has been tailored to the needs of the audience.

“In one of our classic workshops, teams of competitors run companies in competition with each other, making sales to the facilitator,” explained Robin Helweg-Larsen, co-founder, Andromeda Training, Inc. “The game is very visual with different stacks of colored plastic chips in tubes representing the assets or liabilities of a company. There can be hundreds of chips on the board. Red chips represent debt. Black chips represent equity. Silver for cash. Different colors for fixed assets and inventory. The physical chips on the board allow the game's players to see at a glance, the financial health of the company, including elements such as cash flow, cost structure, profitability and debt to equity.”

The game board itself is laid out to reflect a company's standard Income Statement structure with the expenses grouped in the normal Income Statement sequence. There's also a part of the game board showing the balance sheet with all the assets grouped in one area, equity in another area and  liabilities in a third area. The simulation can run at five different levels of complexity all played out on the same game board. The game played during a workshop shows how various corporate decisions can affect financial outcomes. Companies generally use the simulations to help employees learn what financial statements encompass, what information they provide, why it's important to control costs and how the decisions employees make might impact the company.

Back in 1996, Michelin was the original launch partner for the Andromeda Training Workshops and they have put some 30,000 people through the workshop under license. Abbott Labs, Schneider Electric and hundreds of other firms worldwide have turned to Andromeda Training to help build the financial literacy of their employees. The workshops are now available in 15 languages, including Arabic.

“At the end of most workshops, we have a company board module. This is where employees leave the game they're playing behind, walk over to another table and see their own company's finances laid out in stacks of chips, where each chip represents a certain amount of money depending on the size of the company,” said Helweg-Larsen. “People either react with excitement or gasps of horror when they see their corporate finances represented graphically. It's especially upsetting when there are stacks of red liabilities. That looks awful and it's a wakeup call. This generally leads to a facilitator-led discussion among the participants about their strategic positioning in the real world.”

“After a few years we realized that we not only had a great model for the finances of companies, but that people understood corporate financial health very clearly when they could see it displayed on the game board,” said Eliza Helweg-Larsen, co-founder of Andromeda Training. “People who couldn't understand numbers and spreadsheets, immediately became aware of what the stacks of colored chips on our game board implied. Almost any company could be modeled on our game board and immediately we wanted to create an application that would allow people to see corporate financial information at a glance, rather than digging through columns of numbers and spreadsheets.”

It sounds like such a simple idea but to create the app became a complicated endeavor. Over the years there were five failures before the iPad app, “Visual Finance” was launched at the App Store in January. Initially, the issue was that technology wasn't mature enough to bring the Helweg-Larsens’ idea to fruition. Later it became clear that some early ideas on functionality would have to be scaled back, as they were too unwieldy in actual implementation.

Visual Finance relies on the financial reports of Fortune 500 companies, which go to the US' Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval (EDGAR) system and collected by a company called Mergent, which structures the data uniformly. By entering a company's stock ticker into the app, users can view an overall annual financial snapshot of the specified company, year by year, going back as far as 30 years. Visual Finance displays the income statement and balance sheet in a single graphical representation, instantly showing the relationships between key financial indicators. This unique visual picture helps make financial analysis quick and intuitive. The single-glance view is interactive: tap and see the numbers in the related financial statement, key ratios or glossary definitions. Instead of paging back and forth, trying to compare complex numerical data, this simple, single picture gives the user an instant read on a company.

Four Clouds, LLC developed the app based on the concept from Andromeda Training. A decision was made not to include banks and other financial institutions at this time as their current balance sheets are highly irregular and outside standard company modeling. The Helweg-Larsens both hope that their app will help people better understand the financial health of many of the world's largest businesses, particularly if individuals are planning on investing. The app would also be of interest to companies who want to sell to or buy from these large companies, or those who are their market competitors.

“In our business we see many people who have a fear of financial numbers. They look at financial statements and aren’t able to process the information in any meaningful way. The visualization methodology we use in Visual Finance makes it easy to see rather than calculate financial ratios,” said Eliza Helweg-Larsen. “It allows even the most finance phobic person to analyze a company’s financial health without having to rely on others to run the numbers for them.”

Visual Finance is free to download from the iPad App Store. Upgrading to the full version allows users to look at the current and past annual financial reports for over 450 of the world’s top companies. More information and screenshots can be seen at http://www.visualfinanceapp.com.