You’ve wired together Stripe, Gusto, QuickBooks, HubSpot, maybe a RevOps platform or two. Integration? You nailed that part.
But when you ask the first-principle questions…
- What’s our burn – today, not last month?
- What’s our real margin after refunds, specials, and churn?
- How much revenue have we promised but not yet earned?
…you’re still exporting, merging, and sanity-checking in spreadsheets. The instinct to “let the tools talk” is right – eventually. But while you’re scaling, the real risk is assuming technology alone can close the gap with your software company’s accounting.
What Relying Too Much on Tech Is Costing You
- You don’t spot cash shocks until it’s déjà vu. Stripe logs collections. Gusto shows payroll. QuickBooks shows bank balance. Unless a human is tying those flows to accrual periods and open POs, you’re learning about runway the moment it runs out.
- You trust numbers no one has challenged. Automated reports apply rules – good for routine bookkeeping, awful for SaaS nuance. Revenue recognition, multi-entity allocations, one-off contract quirks? Those require judgment. Bots don’t second-guess themselves.
- You react to risk you could have priced in. Deferred revenue balloons off-ledger, margins erode behind growth spend, vendor creep hides in “miscellaneous.” By the time an alert fires, the correction is expensive – usually hiring fast and in a panic.
Who’s Actually Owning the Picture?
If your current setup looks like this:
- A bookkeeper enters QuickBooks transactions once a month
- An ops lead babysits Stripe (and maybe HubSpot)
- You are the reconciliation layer – nights, weekends, board-pack time
…you don’t have a financial system. Whenever “everyone owns a slice,” no one owns the data quality. Gaps appear silently, then loudly, then expensively – especially in fast-growing software companies.
What Real Infrastructure Looks Like (Pre- and Post-Onboarding)
True visibility doesn’t start with another app. It starts with people who translate chaos into decisions:
- Centralized reporting on accrual – not bank balance whack-a-mole
- GAAP-aligned revenue recognition so your MRR tells the truth
- Dashboards that surface levers, not just lumpy data dumps
- A software-savvy accounting team that reviews, reconciles, and refreshes every cycle – then automates the parts that should be automated
And here’s the uncomfortable truth for most software company founders: You don’t need to staff up a controller, a CFO, and a finance-ops lead on Day 1. You need a full-stack, outsourced finance team that lives in SaaS metrics, plugs into your tools, and grows with your ARR. The headcount comes after the foundation is steady – never before.
Risk & Readiness Assessment for Software Companies
If you’re still the glue between apps, your stack isn’t working – it’s hiding risk and taxing your bandwidth. Let humans close the loop now; let tech keep the loop closed later.
The risk isn't the tools.The risk is believing the tools are enough.
Our fractional accounting team experts offer free financial risk & readiness assessments for SaaS teams in this exact spot.
It’s a 15-30 minute walkthrough of your current tools, systems, and reporting setup with honest feedback on what’s working, what’s disconnected, and what’s quietly creating exposure you can’t afford.
No prep. No pitch. Just insight.
👉 Book Your Free Assessment
James Wheeler
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesdavidwheeler/James Wheeler has 15 years executive financial leadership experience in service and technology companies. He was a San Diego Business Journal CFO of the Year finalist in 2019. James was the recipient of multiple graduate fellowships at the University of California, San Diego, where he earned a BA in economics and an MBA, before complementing that with executive education at MIT Sloan. He has held several nonprofit and for-profit directorships and committee positions over the past 10 years.
