Puzzle is a new core accounting solution that helps startups build better companies. You get real-time financial statements for fundraising and taxes, plus insights, metrics (like burn, runway, ARR), FDIC coverage monitoring - all in an intuitive UX.
Hi Product Hunt!
@eriktorenberg thanks for hunting us!
We have been working on this for years, and are really excited to (finally!!) get to introduce you to Puzzle, a smart accounting platform designed to help improve your startup.
At a high level, Puzzle is a new accounting core (i.e. a general ledger) plus a real-time financial data platform in a single solution. We think of it sort of like if Quickbooks was specifically designed for the needs of startup founders and their finance teams. You get a host of new benefits and capabilities together, all in real-time.
BENEFITS
🎯 Know your numbers every day
Truly know your numbers so you crush it whether you are just launching, fundraising or leading your teams. Puzzle is a real-time, streaming platform of your company's financials, metrics and insights.
💸 Easily file taxes and stay compliant
Easily stay tax compliant (avoid fines, penalties, mitigate taxes) with a guided experience, one-click tax export and on-demand bookkeepers and tax experts.
📈 Grow your startup with confidence
Understand accounting and finance like a pro with immutable, traceable financials and real-time insights across spend, revenue, and cash burn.
KEY FEATURES
🏎️ Real-time, intuitive design
Finances are now real-time and explorable to anyone, where you can drill down to the “why” behind each and every number.
💯 Financials and metrics, together at last!
Detailed financial statements, startup metrics (like true cash, burn, runway, ARR), spend analysis, FDIC coverage monitoring, and more.
🔎 Verifiably accurate everything
Increase confidence in fundraising, taxes, and audits, where trust is either created or broken
🧠 Automated learning
500+ startups and $10B+ categorized via a learning system across categorizations, rules, reconciliations, anomaly detections, and more that gets better every single day.
⏱️ Onboard in minutes
Seriously! No accountants are required to get set up. Do it yourself, invite your existing bookkeeper, or hire an on-demand expert anytime. It takes on average 2 minutes, more for larger companies.
WHO IS PUZZLE FOR?
✅ Startups using Stripe, Mercury, Brex, Ramp, Gusto, Rippling, Bill.com will see the most automation and benefits.
✅ Startups look for their first accounting system (but we’re happy to help anyone more from an existing system.
✅ Early stage (Pre-seed/formation to Series A), ambitious startups incorporated in the US.
WHAT IS OUR ASK OF YOU?
We ❤️ feedback of what else we can build for you. Our 🎯 is to help startups improve their chances of success, and maximize confidence in their most important 💰 decisions. We prioritize based upon our users (ie you!). Offer good for next sixty days.
Sasha, Lisa, Luke, Scott, Andrew and the rest of our team of founders, CPAs, tax experts, engineers and designers.
@eriktorenberg@sasha_orloff cash-based accounting for startups is a honed craft and a tool like Puzzle makes it much easier.
I love how effective and efficient it's been to work with Puzzle's APIs to plug into startup services that consume cash and help you map expenditures.
we use Puzzle for LTSE's https://startuprunway.io/
@eriktorenberg@tihomirb Thanks @tihomirb! The integration with startuprunway.io is one of our favorite API implementations (API Access: puzzle.io/partners), especially for first time founders. There is no simpler tool to predict runway, and the best part is you dont need any finance knowledge to use it.
BUT... Puzzle provides both cash and accrual books.
Founders like cash ("cash basis") because it helps you predict runway and understand burn.
Accountants and investors like accruals ("accrual basis") because it is arguably a better view of financial health.
We hated choosing, so we built the first "multi-basis" books, so you get both.
I can't paste an image here, but there is a drop down on the homepage that cash "cash" or "accrual". Just pick the one you want to see at the moment, in real-time, every day.
@eriktorenberg@sasha_orloff that's a great point. We built Runway to focus on founders and help them view their startup through cash-based accounting. ofc accrual based has its rightful place.
and this switch between the two views of accounting is very powerful.
@eriktorenberg@tihomirb@vedranrasic That is a good question.
I am going to answer that two ways.
Today, it is person in charge of the taxes, fundraising or business health of an early stage (pre-seed, seed) startup. That is typically the founder, or sometimes they hire an early ops or finance person.
We just built a network of top accountants and tax experts (like @davidphillip who started Fondo), and are building tools for them to be able to do more accurate work faster and easier than ever.
But the future we believe that the relationship between the business and finance/accounting team is one of the most important in a company. So we want everyone to have a single source of truth (financials, metrics, insights), be able to collaborate and align, and have maximum confidence for their most important financial decisions.
Our investors basically say we turn accounting into a system of financial intelligence.
Congrats @sashaorloff and team! Proud to be supporting in a small way. You've been such a champion for founders the last few years -- to that end, can you give the PH community an insight into how you navigated the idea maze with Puzzle early on?
@eriktorenberg Epic question! This is something that I have been thinking about for a decade, ever since the glass shattered for me as a founder. I knew accounting was the "language of business" but I also (naively) assumed it was meant to help founders/entrepreneurs actually improve their company. It turns out that is not true with the options on the market today.
So as I scaled my last two companies, I realized the questions I was getting asked by investors, and the questions I asked from my finance team (or outsourced bookkeeping firm) was not part of the financial reports they were preparing, week after week, month after month.
I just assumed I was doing something wrong. But it turns out that after interviewing hundreds of founders, investors and CFOs, this was a similar theme.
The more I dug into it, the more I was convinced the source of the problem was not with accounting, but accounting software.
We wanted to build software that helped every founder, and every business leader, regardless of their background in accounting and finance do three things:
🤖 Automate as much of the preparation of financials as possible, for fundraising, taxes, audits, or any place where this was needed.
🦉 Understand their business intuitively
⚡ Have real-time access to financials, metrics, trends and insights without gatekeepers.
And then we started getting interested from accountants, and tax experts, and CFOs.
There are a lot of ideas out there. But this one became my obsession.
We are just getting started. I hope the product hunt community helps us take this to the next level.
@sasha_orloff insights without gatekeepers is HUGE 🙌
love the idea that the nitty gritty work of bookkeeping can be rolled up to value add insights when thinking strategically about my startup
@royce_branning1 Thanks! Your early support and feedback just continued to make the product better and better. Please don't stop suggesting ideas, as we prioritize features based upon customers like you.
Puzzle was designed *specifically* for founders like @royce_branning1 that want to know their metrics COLD for fundraising and making informed decisions.
@anteloper Early users like clearspace have been critical for us, so we appreciate the support. Also that's a phenomenal question, thanks for teeing me up :) As a CPA, data enthusiast, and optimist about the startup ecosystem here are some of my dreams:
1 - Just like Figma did for design, finance data will be central and legible across the organization through a single platform, with summaries and insights and workflows targeted to each user.
2 - Startups will control their finances and have sophisticated metrics from Day 1, without needing an intermediary. Better products can become better businesses, and fundraising + investor updates will be built on rich data.
3 - All companies will have a software-enabled sidekick to share financial insights and get them metrics (ARR, retention, burn trends) on demand.
4 - Audits will be a breeze with financial statements generated with traceable data and clear accounting workflows.
And a LOT more.
@anteloper@andrew_robinson2 what a good question!
I think there are two things that will be different 5 years from now.
🚀 Every entrepreneur will finally have a tool that improves their chances of success
🧮 Every accountant will have a few more of 😀 than 😡
🔓 Every company can use the best software on the market, instead of choosing between mediocre bundled software or needing to learn how to code in python.
And then all the benefits below from Andrew.
I generally think the most important skillset for a leader is resource/capital allocation, which requires trust and alignment between business leaders and finance teams. The reason is building a company is part art and part science. If we can bring a bit of science (data, insights, analysis) to every leader, so they can have confidence in their most important financial decisions, companies will be better.
Better for employees.
Better for partners.
Better for investors.
Better for our economy.
@andrew_robinson2@sasha_orloff love it, thanks for the perspective. it's cool hearing from veteran founders on what they value in leadership. thanks for your sharing your voice with the community!
I consider this comment is an immense honor, from the royalty of startup accounting and taxes firms themselves, @accountalent. You have taught us a lot, made our product better, and we are just getting started!
@accountalent@sasha_orloff Amazing to have an early partner that has taught us a lot about the early stage accounting ecosystem, and that makes the Puzzle experience better!
Been using Puzzle for quite some time now, and we LOVE it! Funny enough, we didn't even know how painful accounting can be before we spoke to fellow YC companies that run on Quickbooks, lol! Also, the team has been helpful -- they truly care about startups.
Also, Puzzle gives us great insights into the financial health of our company.
@tobias_co_founder_flike THIS! It's our biggest challenge actually! You just assume the current solutions work well for startups, and they don't. You don't get what you need. You don't get it in real-time. And you dont realize how expensive maintaining your books can be.
Your early support means the world to us. Really appreciate it.
We <3 Puzzle and the Puzzle team so much - it's truly been a godsend. Easy to use, integrates with what we need it do, and provides a super simple snapshot of the key metrics we need both internally and for our investors. Having both cash basis and accruals in one tool is going to save us significant time. Highly recommend.
@lucyhoag Thank you for your early support. If you have more ideas of what we can build for you, keep em coming! We want to be the de facto choice for every founder starting on their journey - help them scale, help them better understand their business, and grow with confidence. Also appreciate you sharing here. THANK YOU!
We switched over from Pilot/Quickbooks (don't sign with Pilot, trust me) to Puzzle, which meant going from a total sh*tshow to a world where I actually look forward to doing all my simple startup accounting myself. The team has been incredible.
@arndt_voges Thank you for the comment and support. We have a team dedicated to making sure your questions are answered, and if there is anything else we can build for you, please don't hesitate to ask!
Gosh I wish this existed when we started Gusto. It's about time innovation comes to the business accounting space. This is going to be huge. Congratulations @sasha_orloff and team 💯
@tomer_london and if it wasn't for amazing products like Gusto, there wouldn't be a need for Puzzle! Founders should get to choose the best software on the market, and they should have an accounting and finance solution that is built native to the best solutions in the market, not whatever mediocre software happens to be bundled into a legacy platform.
@sasha_orloff@tomer_london Well we're very glad Gusto exists while we're building Puzzle!
We are building on the shoulders of giants like Gusto who have accelerated startup innovation by making business building seamless.
This is awesome! Congrats on the launch @sasha_orloff. We spent so much time in the early days of Pinwheel trying to get our financial statements togethers for fundraises and tried for so long to build a real-time tracker for metrics like burn and runway. Puzzle solves such a core need for early stage startups!
@kurtislin It is just so hard. And it shouldn't be. We are here to make this better for every founder can have the highest confidence in their most important financial decisions.
@sasha_orloff@kurtislin This type of stuff gets us amped! Building on the legacy of great companies that have accelerated startup innovation by made business-building easier from Day 1.
@davj Excited to get to work with Fondo! Today is our day to launch, but the market just hasn't even seen what a Puzzle + Fondo partnership will do for the founder/tech ecosystem. We are JUST GETTING STARTED!!!
@edworking Thank you! Hopefully the first impression is an indicator of our differentiation.... the whole experience is built for modern founders, not just finance experts.
@filip_zaleski1 For everyone who loves our website, and things like our new Testimonials Page (https://puzzle.io/testimonials) showing off some of our 500+ founders and $10B+ of transactions categorized, check out Webnomads and the one and only @filip_zaleski1
congrats @sasha_orloff and team! I've been lucky to use Puzzle for over a year and have never opened QuickBooks. Accounting has always been a breeze and not something I've worried about. Excited to continue to see the team pump out new features.
@vtellis Oh man, thanks for the comment, and your early support. If it wasn't for amazing founders like you, Puzzle would not exist at all. Keep on making the world a better place, and we are here to support you along the way.
@vtellis early users like you have been part of our progress here. So fun to hear about founders actually directly engaging with their accounting rather than having it be an annoying siloed compliance exercise!
@trevor_lee Pumped to have you as a user, and thanks for the support! Simple onboarding is hopefully a "Puzzle handshake" to indicate that your startup accounting experience has reached the modern age, starting from Day 1.
@trevor_lee@andrew_robinson2 How am I out of award votes! This is the perfect summary of how easy Puzzle makes it for founders. 14 clicks. 120 seconds. It's 🧨
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