Why Accountants Love Puzzle for their Accounting Software

Puzzle is the modern accounting replacement for QuickBooks and the first accounting software designed for startups, trusted by leading accounting firms. But what does that actually mean?

Startups have many demands beyond traditional accounting: financial statement preparation for taxes, fundraising, investor reporting, access to real-time key metrics, runway calculations, and more. As a startup grows, they become more complicated, and the stakes and problem-solving increase. Just about every team, from product to engineering to HR, has a real-time data workflow platform—except for finance.

Puzzle aims to change that. By combining a streaming financial data platform and a general ledger in one, we unlock new capabilities that give startups and their accounting teams superpowers. One important step is improving the important relationship between a founder and their accounting team, which can stem from the differences between what a good accountant needs to do for GAAP, and what a founder needs from them to run their startup.

Here are the top 5 reasons startup founders and accountants love us, and we are just getting started:

Our system automates the boring, repetitive data entry and gets smarter with every transaction.

Puzzle’s software automatically drafts your financial statements, bank reconciliations, receivables, startup metrics, variance, and financial reports to review and approve. With every transaction, every reconciliation, and every closed period, Puzzle’s autonomous accounting system gets smarter, automating more and more so you can focus on exceptions instead of the repetitive tasks month after month. Click, audit, and trace everything, anytime in our general ledger explorer, audit log, transaction history, or clickable financials.

Collaboration, not delegation.

By tagging other users, you can request a category review, upload a receipt or invoice, or anything else you can think of, just like how you would tag someone in Slack, Notion, or other cloud-based collaboration tools. It’s a faster, more intuitive way to clear up questions without an email chain or meetings. We believe the partnership between a founder, fractional CFO, and the finance team is the underrated superpower of the most successful companies. Puzzle was designed to help empower teams with data for the most important decisions: to see the same data, tag people, add notes, and create a continuous living history of your business. With most legacy solutions, you have ongoing email, text, and phone clarifications with your finance team, adding countless hours to your monthly bill.

Impeccable financial records from inception to IPO.

Puzzle maintains a full financial history on the first immutable accounting ledger with financial statements, supporting documents like invoices or receipts, and a record of every transaction so you are tax, audit, and fundraise ready all the time. Most legacy solutions only give you summary reports.

Puzzle is your fractional engineering team to support your accounting & finance teams.

Our certified public accountants(CPA) and CPA-turned-engineers are here to build what you need. Let us know what else we can build for you, so you can focus on high-value work, satisfied stakeholders, and no more dependency on engineering for that “one thing that would make your job so much better.'“

We welcome all feedback, unfiltered, anytime. No more calculating your cash flow, burn, and runway using Excel or a spreadsheet.

Get cash, accruals (coming soon), and startup metrics in one, real-time platform.

A single source of truth underpins Puzzle and allows you to have simultaneous cash basis and accrual basis financials, cash reports, and startup metrics in a single platform. No engineers are needed because we spent years doing the hard work.

Sync your current fintech stack (banks, credit cards, payroll, and payment processor), and Puzzle’s system will draft your financial statements and reconciliations in minutes. No more choosing between cash or accrual, reconciling metrics between multiple systems, or convincing founders of why accruals are important.

We want to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs, bookkeepers, and accountants to build businesses and be confident about making the best financial decisions using Puzzle.

Today’s tools make it too hard to see your full financial picture or balance sheet (especially if you’re a first-time non-financial founder), whether at day one or scaling your startup, so we’re building a platform designed to help new and growing startups thrive.

Sign up here, or if you'd like a live demo, click here. Feel free to tweet, or follow us on LinkedIn as well.