How Finfuego Builds Lean, Real Time Finance With Brex and Puzzle

Building lean finance operations without drowning in manual work

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As a small, focused team building an AI platform for middle market CFOs, Finfuego wanted its own finance operations to match its product values: lean, automated, and clear.

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In its early days, all of their spend ran through Bank of America and Excel spreadsheets with complex legal and bank workflows. “It was incredibly labor-intensive,” shared Bekah Fields, Operations Engineer at Finfuego. 

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Expenses lived in statements and unsynced files. It worked at a very small scale, but it was time consuming and fragile.

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Once more employees came on board, the team needed:

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• P-cards and spend controls for company purchases
• Employee cards for day-to-day purchases
• A clear view of cash and expenses across accounts
• A way to stop spending hours inside spreadsheets

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For accounting, they briefly tried QuickBooks.

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Setting up QuickBooks quickly became a breaking point. Bekah spent five to six hours manually categorizing transactions and still did not finish implementation. The team wanted something more modern, more automated, and better aligned to how they actually work.

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They needed an accounting tool that was:

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• Simple for a lean team to set up and use
• Smart enough to automate categorization and analysis
• Integrated deeply with their corporate cards  so they could see a full picture of spend

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“With QuickBooks,I spent hours manually categorizing transactions before I gave up. We needed something more sophisticated that actually worked with how we operate.”

One-click Brex integration and real time dashboards in Puzzle

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Finfuego adopted Brex to manage all of their spend. “Brex made it incredibly easy to assign p-cards and employee cards, giving us instant visibility to track all authorized expenses.” With spend controls automatically enforced at each swipe, it was a huge upgrade from the manual, statement-based expense reporting Bekah previously handled and saved her 60% of her time vs. working in Excel.

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An advisor recommended Puzzle. Once Finfuego saw how closely Puzzle fit into the modern financial stack, “and with the seamless integration with Brex, Puzzle was a much better fit." 

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Finfuego onboarded using the Brex and Puzzle one-click integration with a clear goal: build an accounting foundation that follows the same philosophy as Bekah mentioned, “"Choosing Brex and Puzzle fit right into our company’s values of being as lean as possible from the start, and automating things wherever we can."

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From Bekah’s perspective, connecting Brex and Puzzle was the key unlock.

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As Bekah set up accounting in Brex, she saw the option to automatically sync her expenses with Puzzle. With one click -- literally – she authenticated and connected the accounts. 

“Connecting Brex and Puzzle was so fast, I barely remember doing it. Everything was automatically synced and ready.”

Once the connection was live, Puzzle’s analysis tools and dashboards started to deliver immediate value. 

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Even before every small transaction was fully categorized, Finfuego could see:

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• Top expenses by category and by month
• A clean split between payroll and non payroll costs
• A high level view that confirmed their books were largely accurate

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With a more realistic view of runway and of building projections in spreadsheets that included future investments, Finfuego now sees exactly what is in its primary Brex account and how much true buffer exists. 

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“Now, we’re able to see what our biggest expenses are each month immediately — it gives me peace of mind that even small, non-categorized transactions are accounted for and looked right,” said Bekah. “I always knew our books were up to date.”

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“Puzzle keeps us honest about our realistic runway. It shows what we actually have to spend, not just what we expect to raise. If the buffer starts to look thin, I see it right away.”

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Hours saved, realistic runway, and a finance stack that matches their values

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With Brex and Puzzle working together, Finfuego has turned what used to be a manual chore into a lean, reliable system that fits the way they want to work as an early stage startup, saving 

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Up to four hours every week on all expense and bookkeeping tasks compared to spreadsheets. Their implementation time also significantly reduced from roughly six unfinished hours in QuickBooks to about ninety minutes in Puzzle. 

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Bekah’s time is now focused on  checking and finalizing transactions instead of wrestling with CSVs, PDF bank statements, or rebuilding reports. All of Finfuego’s expenses are automatically prepared, reviewed, and exported into Puzzle with a clear, always up-to-date dashboard of runway and cash in one place.

“Brex and Puzzle’s one-click integration has taken a big load off our backs and frees us up to do more important work,” Bekah shared. “It was perfectly seamless, very helpful –I would recommend it to any founder.”