Financial Cents surveyed 261 bookkeeping firms for their 2026 Tech Stack Report and the thing most of them asked for was subtraction. Nine in ten want to run on four tools or fewer. Fewer than half get there.
What the survey found
Spreadsheets are the second most used tool in the average stack, behind file storage and ahead of practice management software. Seventy percent of firms re-enter data by hand between tools at least a few times a week. Half admitted they can’t be sure nothing is slipping, and only one firm in three can see all of its client work in one place.
Asked about the biggest problem their setup causes, the top answer was cost. Too many subscriptions, each doing a small piece of the job.
What it costs
The report has owners describing what actually went wrong. One missed a tax deadline because the file lived on a laptop and the laptop went on vacation with its owner. Another onboarded a client, skipped the sales tax setup, and filed late. Somewhere a signed client’s work sat untouched for twelve months because the handoff never happened. Somewhere else a firm lost $11,200 a year in fees and could not say exactly when.
These read like ordinary firms, where the work is spread across enough places that nobody can see all of it at once. A deadline slips once. The owner’s week slips every week, and nobody writes that one down.
Everyone is trying to automate the books
Most AI products pitched at firms right now automate a slice of the accounting. The rest bolt a chatbot onto a stack that already has too many pieces. All of it points at the books. The owner’s week goes to everything around them.
Try this. Write down what you did last Tuesday. Twenty minutes rereading an email thread before a call so you’d sound like you remembered it. A proposal that took an evening because pricing lives in your head and the template lives in a folder you had to find. Three follow-ups you owed and two you sent. Checking whether the new client’s onboarding had actually started. Asking someone on your team where things stood, because the honest answer was you didn’t know. The categorizing and reconciling were probably the smallest block on the page.
Running a firm is mostly everything else.
What we’re building
Every item on that Tuesday list has one thing in common: the information already existed somewhere in the firm. The thread was in the inbox. The last call was recorded. The quote was in the CRM. The onboarding checklist was in a doc. The owner spent the day gathering it because nothing else would.
That is the job we are giving to our platform. Before a call it has read the thread and listened to the last conversation, and it hands you what to say and what to watch for. After the call it writes the follow-up and builds the proposal for you. When a deal closes it builds the client, assigns the team, lays out onboarding with every step dated, and invites the client to the portal. Client documentation updates itself when someone learns something new. Each day it shows the handful of things that need a decision, and keeps everything else out of the way. It drafts. You send.
The books will get automated. Plenty of people are on it and some of them are good. We are focused on solving the rest of the week.
If you run a firm and want to see what that looks like, start here.
