2024 Outlook Dinner: Accounting & Finance Software

Last week we hosted 40+ accounting and finance professionals that work in tech for a dinner in San Francisco filled with community, content and Campfire! Our CEO John Glasgow previewed the next phase of Campfire with the audience and moderated Chithra Rajagopalan and Gracie Zaro for an investor / operator perspective during a fireside chat. Attendees ranged from CFO’s at pre-IPO companies to accountants at Series A companies and outsourced accounting teams. Sharing key takeaways from the night below.

Key takeaways

1. Doing more with less - Accounting and finance teams are facing tight budgets given the broader macro environment. These teams are expected to set the tone for their organization by being frugal with spending and holding themselves to “spartan” tech stacks. With that being said, many tech companies are still scaling revenue and customers, so manual processes are growing linearly in resource investment which is slowing down the monthly close and financial reporting.
2. It’s time for something new - Many attendees loathed their accounting software, even the ones that have invested heavily in migrating to a mid-market ERP. Modern accounting and finance teams are craving modern accounting software yet acknowledged there weren’t any good options in the market. Every category of their tech stack has turned over in the past 10 years except their general ledger.
3. Spend management - The hottest category of the accounting tech stack is spend management. Ramp, Brex, BILL, Navan, Expensify and Airbase are all great options, but enforcing policies is not easy and creates friction between accounting/finance teams and their co-workers. Opportunity exists for software to takeover as the "bad cop" to better enforce policies such as receipt collection beyond the standard budgeting and spend limits by category. Some folks have started to take away the corporate card from an employee when the corporate policy is repeatedly not followed.
4. Shifting towards strategic work - Accounting and finance teams are pushing to be more strategic, high-value work as they move away from performing manual work to shift from traditional bookkeeping work. For example: less journal entries and more ROI analysis on various advertising channels to support the marketing team in optimizing spend.
5. Spreadsheets? - Spreadsheets are great for ad-hoc analyses, but many folks are still managing repetitive accounting workflows in spreadsheets. Attendees acknowledged that they have to migrate to software to harness automation as the next step in their automation journey to accelerate their monthly close process.??
6. Artificial Intelligence - This was hotly debated at the event with only ~5% citing that they are currently using artificial intelligence in their accounting and finance workflows today. However, attendees unanimously agreed that they are interested as soon as they deem artificial intelligence to be ready, reliable and providing attribution so users can “trust but verify”.
7. Campfire - Current customers that attended were buzzing with how much time they were saving by automating their revenue workflows with Campfire. We previewed an exciting Campfire updated with attendees and received so much praise it was overwhelming. More on this topic soon!

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