How Debit & Co. Closed 15 Clients by the 4th Business Day with Puzzle
15 / 15
Clients closed by Day 4
25–30%
Less time per close per client
50
Clients Aaron sees the team supporting
Aaron Ressel who spent his career as a financial controller and his partner Kevin as a CFO. They were good at their jobs. But everywhere they went, the same problem: finding great accounting talent was nearly impossible.
Two years ago, they stopped looking and started building. Debit & Co. launched with two employees and a simple thesis: a small team with the right technology could outperform a large team running on legacy tools.
Today they have twelve employees, a growing roster of clients, and a month-end close process that most established firms can't match.
When they launched, Aaron and Kevin evaluated every major platform. They settled on QuickBooks — cloud-based, widely adopted, and marketed heavily on its automation capabilities.
"QuickBooks has automations, which is the key thing everybody wants to talk about. But if the automations aren't good, then it's actually worse. You automate a problem from a little thing to a big thing." — Aaron Ressel
He watched it happen in real time. A client with employees across 40 states ran payroll — and QuickBooks automatically created new accounts, posted to them incorrectly, and generated a reconciliation nightmare. Every single month. The automation didn't save time. It manufactured a bigger problem downstream.
The firm needed something fundamentally different: software where accountants set the rules and AI executes them exactly — not a black box guessing at intent.
Aaron and Kevin had been early AI adopters — using ChatGPT from day one. They understood the technology and its limits. When they found Puzzle, they recognized what they'd been looking for: an AI-native platform where the accountant stays in control.
"We love AI Close. We basically used it along with the checklist — firing down all the different tasks, and some of the stuff that it did was awesome." — Aaron Ressel
The most telling moment came when a team member — not a developer, an accountant — built their own AI Close agent from scratch.
"One person on our team made their own agent within AI Close and it was very cool. It basically checks like a billion things for trend analysis. We really enjoyed going through that because reviewing is a big part of the actual job of getting it out the door." — Aaron Ressel
That's not a feature. That's a capability shift. Non-engineers building custom review workflows — without IT, without a consultant, without a six-month implementation. Eight members of the Debit & Co. team are now Puzzle-certified and running their own closes.
In their first full month with AI Close, Debit & Co. closed every single client by the fourth business day. Not most of them. All of them.
"We were able to basically shave off between 25 and 30% of the work just right off the bat for each one of them. Saving one to one and a half hours for 15 clients is a great thing." — Aaron Ressel
"We're going to love the idea that we have 50 clients to use that on. That's part of the goal — for us to grow and keep adding more and more." — Aaron Ressel
When Aaron describes Puzzle to other firm owners, he doesn't reach for buzzwords. He reaches for the thing that actually matters to a practitioner.
"Open template. You can develop all kinds of agents, establish all the different rules. It's like NetSuite — but without paying for everything." — Aaron Ressel
That contrast — NetSuite's power without NetSuite's cost and rigidity — is exactly what Puzzle is built to be. Not a black box. Not a locked workflow. A platform where accountants are the architects and AI is the engine.
Debit & Co. didn't just close faster. They built a firm that scales.
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