Here’s To The Future Of Accounting
Why We Built Numeral
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'
The Times Are A Changin’ - Bob Dylan
To understand the genesis for Numeral and why we’re building our company now, let’s go back to the 60’s
History of ERPs
MRP (Material Requirement Planning) systems were introduced in the 1960s for manufacturers who needed a solution to run their businesses.
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems were introduced in the 1970s as other industries and businesses, not just manufacturers, needed an operating system. The term ‘Enterprise Resource Planning’ was coined by Gartner in 1990.
What is an ERP? A singular unified database for information from across the company. ERP systems bring in data from all business functions (accounting, supply chain, operations, sales, manufacturing, human resources, etc) and serve as a single source of truth for data.
The Great Unbundling
Over the past two decades, ERPs have been rapidly unbundling due to the increase in business complexity and the introduction of robust point solutions to handle said complexity.
Modern businesses today are unable to rely on one monolithic ERP to handle all aspects of their businesses. CFOs and CAOs at high-growth companies today rely on 20 different systems that each handle 20 different use cases better than any single ERP could.
More growth, more systems.
Impact on Accounting
Accounting teams globally are feeling the pain of this unbundling.
Need payment processing? Stripe is an option. Billing? Zuora is an option. Subscriptions? Recurly is an option. E-Commerce? Shopify is an option. Taxes? Avalara is an option. Currency conversions? Oanda is an option. CRM? Salesforce is an option. Expenses? Ramp is an option. Payroll? Gusto is an option. And so on.
An influx of systems into any company’s financial tech stack inevitably leads to massive amounts of disparate financial data. The end result is accounting teams moonlighting as data engineers and spending inordinate amounts of time in spreadsheets while missing their kid’s recitals and games.
We built Numeral to remedy acute pain points that accounting leaders and their teams are currently experiencing. Pain points that did not exist before, but are incredibly prevalent now.
A new era of accounting is being ushered in. Times are a changin’.
We’re here to empower accounting teams through it.
