Jonathan Reich 
Subscription revenue is supposed to be predictable. Customers sign up once, the card gets charged every month, and the money shows up whether you had a good week or not. But if you don’t pay attention to the contract and then don’t review the merchant fees line on your P&L, you may not realize that … Read more
As a CPA, I’ve spent a lot of time inside NetSuite, and it’s definitely a love-hate relationship. I’ve built saved searches at 6 AM, untangled intercompany eliminations that nobody had touched in quarters, and sat through renewal calls where the number went up for reasons nobody could quite explain. I like NetSuite. I also know … Read more
Most bookkeeping mistakes don’t announce themselves. They sit quietly in an account called “Uncategorized Expense” or inside a Stripe deposit that nobody broke apart, and they wait. Patiently. Then a lender asks for a balance sheet, an investor asks for gross margin, or your tax preparer asks why revenue on the P&L is $40,000 higher … Read more
Most founders know the feeling. It’s the 18th of the month, you’re about to walk into a lender call, and the most recent financials you have are for a period that ended weeks ago. You know what happened last month because you were there and responsible for it. The reports just haven’t caught up. That … Read more
Campfire has earned plenty of attention as an AI-native ERP for fast-scaling software companies, and for finance teams managing multiple entities and complex revenue contracts, it’s a contender. But its demo-led sales process, quote-only pricing, and annual contracts assume a level of complexity that many businesses shopping for new accounting software simply don’t have yet. … Read more
Checks are slow, cost money to print and mail, get lost, and are one of the most common targets for payment fraud. None of that is news to the person signing a stack of them every Thursday afternoon. So what’s stopping paper holdouts from changing usually isn’t all the downsides; it’s the tangle underneath: a … Read more
Ask three accounting vendors what their AI does to the general ledger, and you will get three answers that sound identical but mean entirely different things. One means a categorization model that guesses the account based on a bank feed line. Another means a chat interface that drafts an invoice when you describe it in … Read more
Most accounting software was built for someone sitting at a desk with two monitors and an afternoon to spare. However, most founders don’t work that way. They get hard questions when they’re in an Uber, in a hallway between meetings, or at 10 p.m. when the laptop is already closed. The answer to those questions … Read more
Shopify makes it deceptively easy to sell but deceptively hard to account for what you sold. What’s not immediately clear to new sellers is that a single payout hitting your bank account is not revenue — it’s gross sales, minus discounts, minus refunds, plus shipping income, plus sales tax you collected on behalf of a … Read more
In recent years, the million-dollar question being asked of accounting software has been “does it have AI?” Most vendors these days have an easy “yes” answer waiting, so in my opinion, there are two narrower questions that are more important to ask. First: Can the AI tools your team already opens every morning reach your … Read more
Stop me if this sounds familiar: Somewhere on a shared drive, there’s a spreadsheet that controls a significant, material line on your balance sheet. It has a tab for each month, a formula column that’s archaic nonsense that no one currently employed understands, and a hard-coded cell from the quarter you closed a deal mid-month … Read more
A merchant services agreement is a business-to-business contract that doesn’t have the same consumer protections as your personal credit card or cell phone plan. Both parties are assumed to have read the document and understood it, and no regulator is going to unwind a clause you skimmed past. This should reframe how you treat the … Read more
Bill pay platforms sit between your client’s vendor invoices and the money that pays them. They capture the bill, route it for approval, move the funds by ACH/check/card, and push the entry back into the ledger so no one is keying it twice. For a business owner paying their own vendors, picking one is a … Read more
Most accounting software was built for a business that sends an invoice and waits to get paid. As we all know, e-commerce does not work that way. You sell through a storefront, a marketplace, a social channel, and maybe a wholesale portal, and each one settles on its own schedule, nets its own fees, and … Read more
This old question usually shows up the same way. It’s Sunday night, the board deck is due Tuesday, and you’re rebuilding the same three-statement model you rebuilt last quarter because half the assumptions have gone stale and the actuals never tied out cleanly in the first place. The controller closed the books on time. That … Read more
Xero is good at capturing a bill; it’s the payment itself that tends to fall out of the system. You code the bill, route it for approval, mark it awaiting payment… and then open a separate browser tab to your bank, cut a check, or hand a list to whoever has signing authority. The payment … Read more