We Reviewed Mercury’s New Accounting Automation and Here’s Why Mercury and Puzzle Works Better than Mercury and Quickbooks (hint: it’s not Mercury’s fault)

In the fast-paced world of startup finance, accuracy plus efficiency is key.  At Puzzle we pride ourselves as getting your books as accurate as possible, as fast as possible. That’s why we’re excited to share our review of Mercury’s new accounting automation and why Puzzle’s direct integration with Mercury works better and can save you significant time and effort compared to Quickbooks or Xero.

Direct Integration

Puzzle directly ingests Mercury’s API into its system, capturing not just transactions but detailed metadata such as transaction descriptions, memo fields, additional notes, wire details and most importantly - bank statements. This is in stark contrast to data being pushed into Quickbook's data quarantine, where you have to manually review it and push it to the general ledger, and still requires manual bank reconciliations to assure you have all the data.  Both rely on humans to oversee and validate, creating manual work in ledgers like QBO.

The Downstream Effects:

No Setup Necessary with Mercury and Puzzle

‍Quickbooks requires you to setup your account, your chart of accounts (if you even know how to), map your transactions, choose cash or accrual (hint: you want both), and not make any mistakes.  Basically, hire a bookkeeper to get started.
In contrast, anyone can setup Puzzle in a matter of minutes, no expertise required.

Categorization Automation

This comprehensive data integration allows Puzzle to auto-categorize up to 80% of transactions with Mercury automatically, with no human intervention.  That includes auto-linking bank transfers, credit card payments, individual transactions, and AI tools and collaboration for last mile transactions.In contrast, using Mercury’s accounting automation with Quickbooks users still need to manually categorize their transactions, which can be time-consuming and error-prone.

Pre-reconciled Transactions

Categorization is only one part of the accounting equation. Reconciliation is the next crucial step. Puzzle simplifies this by picking up statement balances via the Mercury API and receipts from the customer’s preferred spend management systems, pre-reconciling each transaction. This eliminates the need to toggle between systems or manually upload receipts and statements, significantly reducing the tedious work involved.

In contrast, customers using  manual accounting systems, such as QuickBooks,  even in combination with Mercury’s accounting automation, still need to reconcile bank statements manually, resulting in more time and effort spent on making sure you have all of your transactions in the system.

Case Studies

For founders…. it's also so easy, even a founder can do it themselves. Flike from Y-Combinator has been leveraging Puzzle and Mercury's API to autogenerate their financial statements in the early days. Read more here.

For accountants… we conducted a detailed case study with one of our bookkeeping partner, Trivium, which saved 50% of the time needed to close books by using the Mercury API on Puzzle. Check out the full case study here.

In summary, Puzzle’s direct integration with Mercury offers superior data accuracy, traceability automation in categorization, and pre-reconciled books, leading to significant time savings and increased accuracy for startups.

Say goodbye to manual ledger work and embrace the streamlined, automated future of accounting with Puzzle and Mercury in Puzzle.