FICCI FLO, under the leadership of 43rd National President, Ms. Puja Garg, organized an insightful financial literacy session, titled The Financial Tiramisu, with CA Aashish Sachdev, an expert in finance, technology and artificial intelligence. The webinar helped women entrepreneurs and artisans in the textile, handloom, and craft sector make smarter business and financial decisions for building a sustainable craft business.
CA Aashish Sachdev helped FLO members in pricing their handcrafted products correctly, understanding the right costs, and profitability, articulating the unique value of craftsmanship and differentiating handcrafted products from machine-made alternatives. CA Sachdev also discussed the importance of data privacy and redaction for protecting sensitive information while sharing with others.
According to CA Sachdev, practical tools, such as Microsoft Excel, data analytics, and AI can support pricing decisions, customer understanding, forecasting, and growth. Market data and product performance metrics are important for entrepreneurs to make smarter decisions about production, inventory, marketing, and profitability.
Key Takeaways
- Microsoft Excel and its formulas are useful in determining the right selling price of craft products by comparing costs and profit margins.
- Data analytics tools like Excel help entrepreneurs identify errors in financial calculations. Functions such as AVERAGE and HARMEAN help compare simple and harmonic averages, while ROUND helps calculate accurate product costs and selling prices.
- CA Aashish Sachdev demonstrated how digital and AI tools, including ChatGPT Plus, Claude, Adobe Acrobat, PDF24, and Google Trends, can simplify tasks, improve productivity, and support better ideas and decision-making.
- Google Trends is a powerful tool for market research for entrepreneurs and artisans.
- Data redaction helps protect sensitive information when sharing documents. Tools like Adobe Acrobat and PDF24 can redact PDF content, while data masking using Excel’s Custom Number Formatting can help hide sensitive numbers from casual viewing.
- ChatGPT and Claude are useful for brainstorming, writing/content creation, analysis, and supporting business workflows.
Outcome
The Financial Tiramisu strengthened the capacity of FLO members by building financial literacy and introducing digital and AI tools to support better pricing, business decisions, and growth in the textile, handloom and handicraft sector. The session highlighted the importance of understanding costs, pricing strategies, and profitability for women entrepreneurs and artisans to build financially sustainable craft businesses.
The Financial Tiramisu was held under the aegis of the FLO Textiles, Handlooms, and Handicrafts initiative, led by Varuna Anand (Lead) and Ambar Pariddi Sahai (Co-Lead), in collaboration with the FLO Financial Literacy initiative, led by Priyanka Gulati (Lead) and Poonam Mohapatra (Co-Lead).