What’s in your tech stack?

Long ago, I used Excel in college to do some of my papers for my Econ major. Excel was considered to be relatively new at the time. When I started my first job at Cigna insurance, they used Lotus 123. I tried to initiate a change to use Excel and was told that they weren’t going to use software that was so new and may not last. Who uses Lotus 123 now?

I was glad when I started working at startups and could use Excel. I still use Excel sometimes as it still has some very good features that google sheets doesn’t. However, I do heavily use google sheets as it’s easy to collaborate and one doesn’t need to track the files. Microsoft does have one drive now which does address some issues… But both are challenging when one wants to do a forecast between team members and really can’t feed in actuals. After doing some evaluations of forecasting platforms, I am trying Cube .

Other finance functions have evolved as well. We used to use Excel for Expense reimbursements and then I used expensify. Now, I am trying Ramp . We used to pay bills directly on the banking platform, then I used?bill.com. Now, I am also trying Ramp for AP processing as well. Ramp’s OCR and receipt process is far superior to the one that we were using. There’s a huge burden to software that doesn’t work efficiently - more than the cost of the platform itself is the cost of using inefficient software. Ramp also has the capability to issue multiple cards for various platforms so the cost controls are there. At Convex , we use this feature and it’s good for us to get an alert when the charge is greater than the budgeted cost. We plan to implement this feature at MotherDuck as well.

Long ago, I used to use CapMX and now I use Carta . There have been controversies associated with the product but it seems to be the best. Additionally, most law firms use it so it’s efficient to use the platform that is managed by your stock administrator. External users may drive decisions as well.

In the old days, I used spreadsheets for revenue recognition. I used Profitwell for a while but with usaged base billing, we’re using Orb . The team chose this platform for many reasons after careful evaluation. For the finance team, the dashboard and revenue recognition features built in were a huge time saver. For some reason, a certain payment collection’s platform makes it impossible to download the payments by sku. Perhaps one reason is that certain payment platform wants you to use their revenue recognition feature? This wouldn't be the only platform to “beat the competition” by not allowing some basic functionality to work. A certain payroll blocks Ashby because they developed their own ATS. That’s not how software platforms should win the market - they should win by offering a better solution not making it harder to use their competitors.

Why evolve? It's crucial to continuously re-evaluate your tech stack to ensure you're maximizing efficiency, scalability, and the potential benefits of newer software. While some argue that AI might replace accountants, I believe that software should handle transactional work, freeing up accounting and finance professionals to focus on judgment-based and qualitative decisions. I am constantly evaluating new platforms- choosing a platform isn’t a lifelong decision such as marriage. When I encounter an issue or see inefficiency, I will look into alternatives.

I like using a lightweight tech stack evaluation -?Platform Evaluation - High level. There are large corporations that will use a different prolonged process with a team to evaluate. My table would be too simple for them. This type of table is geared for startups - a way for all stakeholders to put in desired features and express outcomes in an efficient manner.

Some things haven’t evolved. I have yet to find a platform that works better than Quickbooks for the GL for small companies.

Here’s my tech stack below: