What's in your tech stack June 2025?

Last year, I published an article on "What's in your finance tech stack?" This time, I am publishing the article with a date as the software landscape is evolving quickly and the tech could change quickly. The biggest impact to tech stacks has been AI.

AP and Expenses

Ramp continues to serve us well. From 2022 to now, we have grown from 10 to almost 70 people with about 3,000 transactions in the first year to over 32,000 transactions during the past year. Ramp takes the work out of manual transactions with their AI engine and also detects issues such as duplicate transactions. We've been able to leverage their spend programs feature for specific use cases with budget controls such as offsets and other spend programs. Ramp definitely makes everything efficient, consistent, and capital efficient.

Closing the Month

We've added Numeric to our stack to improve month-end close efficiency. Numeric compares our GL balances with balance sheet schedules. The Flux analysis leverages AI to explain variances from month to month.

Also, their AI feature ensures your accounting is aligned with GAAP and FASB. ASC 606 is a bear, and it's great to have help with this.

FP&A

We switched to Runway from Cube, which is much better suited to our needs. One major issue was that Cube didn't re-sync our QuickBooks instance, so the chart of accounts wasn't updated automatically—a significant problem for a growing startup adding new accounts. With Runway, we get live data through Fivetran integration. Due to headcount and budget constraints, we currently use two QuickBooks instances for multi-entity consolidations via Google Sheets, with Runway validating the consolidated statements. Runway also provides live feeds for Rippling and Deel so the visibility into headcount spend is transparent. Runway works like magic.

ERP

We're looking into using Rillet for our ERP. We started out with only 1 entity without revenue and expanded to 2 entities with complex revenue challenges as we started annual plans in March. Rillet has excellent AI capabilities which should relieve the headache for finance leaders.

Legal Documents

We're in the midst of implementing Common Paper for reviewing our sales agreements for speed of revisions and capital efficiency. Common Paper uses AI to analyze the requests from customers for license agreements.

What are the guardrails for using AI for Finance? Security At MotherDuck, we take security seriously. SOC2 and GDPR compliance is a strict requirement for all finance platforms. The security of data for our employees, customers, vendors, and investors is paramount. We won't do anything that puts them at risk. We will continue to request SOC2 reports from our software vendors.

Ownership of Data As part of security, we don't want our data incorporated into other knowledge bases or to become part of product offerings. This becomes tricky with platforms that use aggregated data for trend analysis, such as Pave for compensation standards or Carta for funding, valuations, and employee compensation trends.

What's next? AI Agents are interesting. We love Claude and it would be great to be able to use something like that across platforms.

Payment collections

I am looking at a few options - Invoice Butler, Tabs, etc.