Your Accounting Software Is Still Living in the Past

01 /The Concept

Puzzle wants to become the new standard for accounting software.

The platform handles three things:

- Real-time tracking of revenue, expenses, and overall financial balance

- Custom financial metrics – the ones that matter for understanding the company's health and investor attractiveness – updated live as numbers change

- One-click tax handling and export of the relevant returns and payment files

Data doesn't need to be entered manually or imported. Puzzle integrates natively with the platforms through which companies receive and make payments, with those cash flows syncing in real time.

But Puzzle isn't just a cash flow tracker – cash flow is only the raw material. The platform is built to turn that data into financial models and analysis.

One click activates CFO Mode (Chief Financial Officer mode), shifting the interface from bookkeeping to financial analysis.

A notable feature is collaborative finance:

- Team members can be asked directly about specific transactions without leaving the platform – questions and answers live as comments on the transaction itself, with no separate email thread required.

- Specific data types and metrics can be opened to specific team members, so they can see the real-money impact of their work.

Puzzle connects to external platforms via API and exposes its own API in return, enabling tighter integrations for anyone who needs them. For example, Puzzle can sync live to AngelList, where many investors track their portfolio companies' metrics – eliminating the manual update step entirely.

Basic cash flow tracking is free. Financial analysis capabilities cost $100 per month. Full automation tools run $360 per month. While the platform is in its current testing phase, premium tiers are available at no charge.

Puzzle has been in active development for three years and only recently opened to the public. In that time it has worked with real clients to get the product to the right level of functionality and usability – accumulating more than 500 customers and tracking over $10 billion in transactions through the platform.

The current round is $15M. Their first round in 2021 was $5M.

02 /Why It Matters

Puzzle positions itself as a tool for startup founders. That positioning might seem limiting given the size of the target market. But there's a reason it makes sense.

Accounting and finance are deeply conservative fields. The majority of large companies do their books and run their financial analysis on legacy platforms – and selling them something new is an uphill battle that may not be worth fighting.

Paul Graham once made the point that if you can't sell a large company a new way of solving an old problem, sell it to startups instead. Some of those startups will grow into large companies – and they'll keep using the platform they started on, setting a new default for the next generation of enterprises. Puzzle is running that playbook.

So what does Puzzle actually give founders?

Take ARR – annualized recurring revenue. Every founder needs to be able to quote an accurate ARR figure on the spot. But ARR isn't as simple as last month's revenue times twelve. The calculation has real nuance. And ARR is only one of many metrics that founders and their investors – current and prospective – need to track.

Puzzle computes and updates all of these automatically and in real time.

The "real time" framing appears throughout Puzzle's pitch, and there's a sharp underlying thesis: speed and accuracy in financial accounting is now a competitive advantage. Not because it was never important before, but because the economic environment changed.

For years, what investors wanted from startups was growth – revenue growth at essentially any cost. Profitability was secondary.

That's no longer the case. Since roughly 2020, revenue growth and sales efficiency have both correlated almost equally with startup valuation. The correlation between valuation and net income was slightly negative in 2015; by 2022 it had turned strongly positive, at 71%.

Getting that analysis right requires digging into the financial model, not just the headline number. Founders either need a CFO to do that – or a platform that does it for them. That's Puzzle's offer.

For additional context: a [recent review](/review/dengi-prinosit-findir-a-ne-glavbuh) covered Scaleup Finance, which raised $9.1M for a subscription CFO service that combines a similar platform with actual human financial officers. Two startups converging on the same problem from slightly different angles is usually a good sign that the problem is real.

03 /Opportunities

The case for building financial accounting platforms looks solid – particularly because it's unusually easy to answer the startup investor's standard question: "Why now?"

One additional structural advantage of the concept: the platform is built entirely on API integration. That's the only way to deliver the "real time" promise, and it also creates serious retention.

A post from an independent publication once framed this as the best business model in software:

- Motivation is perishable. While a new user is still excited about your product, get them to integrate it into their workflow. The motivation will fade; the integration will stay.

- First-time enthusiasm vanishes. Users visit less and less, then cancel. The solution is to get embedded before that happens.

- Selling via API is the embed. While the new user still cares, let them do the work of wiring your service into their existing stack.

- When the enthusiasm goes, the integration stays. Removing it means doing work. Doing work takes effort. Effort is a hassle. Easier to keep paying.

Build an accounting and financial analytics platform wired into customers' other tools via API, and you can reasonably expect long customer lifetimes and high LTV. Ripping out the integrations becomes its own problem – which is exactly how you want your product positioned.