For years, Renato Villanueva, CEO & Co-Founder of Parallel, kept hearing the same story from startups: we don’t trust our spreadsheets. While founders need fast, reliable answers to financial questions, forecasting tools were often built for finance teams, not founders. Identifying a chronic market gap, Parallel combines tech-enabled accounting services with a powerful financial planning platform built for early-stage startups. By unifying services and software, Parallel delivers CFO-level clarity at a fraction of the cost, helping teams make smarter decisions and scale with confidence.
Established in 2023, the strategic finance partner for early stage companies experienced rapid growth, requiring processes and systems that would scale with them. Prior to adopting Puzzle and Ramp, Parallel struggled with inefficient and highly manual financial workflows. Many customers arrived using QuickBooks or other generic tools that were never designed for SaaS, forcing the team to spend excessive time on manual categorization and reconciliation. Integrations with critical platforms—especially Stripe—were limited or unreliable, creating data gaps and inconsistencies. As a result, bookkeeping often lagged until the 20th of each month, delaying financial visibility and slowing the delivery of forecasting outputs.
These inefficient tools also created a significant barrier to adoption for founders, with platforms that felt overwhelming and unnecessarily complex. “We find with a lot of founders that they'll use busyness as an excuse to not adopt something, when in reality, the learning curve and unintuitive workflows were the real obstacles,” shares Renato. This intimidation impacted both accuracy and timeliness, ultimately limiting Parallel’s ability to provide fast, confident, SaaS-ready financial insights. With a growing customer base, identifying a solution for reliable accounting data, scalable accounting services, and user adoptability became critical.
Renato and his team knew that they needed an integrated, modern financial stack in order to deliver fast, reliable insights to their customers. “Forecasting is dependent on really high quality accounting data,” explains Renato. “This is where Puzzle and Ramp have played an important role because they’re building for founders and small businesses, rather than adopting the ‘build for everyone’ approach.”
Puzzle’s workflows and integrations are designed to boost efficiency, with AI-driven categorization and workflows that reduce manual reconciliation. Finding a true partner in Puzzle, Parallel values the responsive and accessible relationship with the team, creating a sense of shared ownership in building the next generation of the financial stack.
Complementing this with an equally modern approach to corporate spend, Ramp’s onboarding and card deployment process gives founders a fast, frictionless way to start spending—without the hurdles of traditional corporate card setups. “With Ramp, the flow was so easy,” shares Renato. “The minute it’s connected, we can get them spending.”
Ramp’s automation removed the need for receipt chasing, and its clean, structured spend data flows directly into Puzzle, removing one of the biggest sources of manual work for Parallel. “Ramp is the easiest way for you to spend without having to reconcile receipts,” Renato says. “The integration with Puzzle allows us to categorize those expenses so that you can understand how your burn is shaping your results.” The integration’s auto-categorization eliminates the back-and-forth between founders about spend details, freeing up time for high value work.
Parallel has created a unified, scalable onboarding experience that feels simple, fast, and startup-friendly. What used to require long, technical setup is now an intuitive process that gets a full financial stack live from day one. “You can get your entire financial stack up and running in a few minutes by onboarding with Ramp and Puzzle,” shares Renato. Founders can start spending immediately through Ramp, while Puzzle completes accounting migrations with almost no lift from the team—transforming a once-intimidating process into something clean, quick, and easy to adopt.
“You can get your entire financial stack up and running in a few minutes by onboarding with Ramp and Puzzle,”
This simplicity translates directly into rapid speed-to-value for both founders and customers. Parallel can now activate a complete financial stack in days instead of weeks, giving founders instant visibility into spend, burn, and runway. Clean, standardized data flows from Ramp into Puzzle from day one, enabling immediate forecasting without manual cleanup and allowing Parallel to deliver actionable insights far faster than before.
Together, these solutions create a meaningful operational and strategic advantage. Automated workflows, clean data, and a faster month-end close reduce internal burden while empowering founders to make confident decisions earlier—hiring sooner, moving to market faster, and planning with greater precision. Ramp and Puzzle have become core to Parallel’s ability to deliver speed, accuracy, and scale, amplifying their impact across every customer they serve.
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