Puzzle is a modern accounting solution for today's startups, now with effortless revenue recognition. Connect Stripe with a simple OAuth and Puzzle auto-generates your cash revenue and accrual schedules along with key metrics like ARR/MRR, and more.
This is a fabulous and unique tool for founders to make the most of their runway by understanding more about their business's real-time financial health and how that affects their runway. This makes it easier to report back to investors and get hard-data-informed support!
Game changer!
Our biggest feedback from over 1,000+ founders and startup leaders was "how have I never heard of you earlier?!?!"
Well, I don't know! (we are trying!)
@chrismessina, we really, genuinely appreciate you helping us get the word out that there is a new alternative to Quickbooks, designed specifically for startups.
This time, the largest request from the community - effortless revenue recognition!
Now founders can see their financial health in real-time, no expertise required.
Thanks @chrismessina!! We're really excited to show the PH community what we've been working on! 🥳
To be honest, as a founder who's not a financial expert, dealing with revenue recognition has been quite a headache. It's supposed to be a happy moment when you see revenue coming in, but I often found myself confused by the numbers on my spreadsheet.
Life can be unpredictable - that's for sure! But in today's fast-paced tech world, accounting shouldn't add to the uncertainty anymore! Here's to solving another missing part of the Puzzle ;) 🧩
Hey wonderful PH community 👋
Sasha here from Puzzle 🧩. Thanks @chrismessina for the hunt!
It’s 2023 - so why is everybody STILL doing revenue recognition manually?! WTH?!?! 🤯
After I scaled my last startup to $100M of ARR, I did not understand why we were still entering our revenue accounting manually. Here is what I found:
⛔ There was literally no accounting software with built-in revenue recognition.
⛔ There was no accounting software built native to Stripe.
⛔ Revenue accounting was done manually in Excel, which means… error-prone.
This was unacceptable! Even worse, it should be solvable with software. So we challenged ourselves to make startup revenue accounting simply effortless:
✅ Automate revenue recognition with a simple OAuth.
✅ Make it real-time, but verifiably accurate.
✅ See cash, and accrual, and ARR all together.
I'm so excited to share what we've come up with:
🔥 The first-ever core accounting software directly integrated with Stripe that recognizes revenue automatically. All you have to do is connect your Stripe account.
This means if your revenue comes via a subscription, prepaid contracts, or high-volume transactions, you connect your Stripe (payments) to Puzzle (accounting) and get:
- Validated cash revenue (when cash hits your bank)
- Automated accrual revenue (when you deliver the product/service)
- Real-time MRR, ARR, Net Churn, and Net Retention calculations
- View revenue by customer, product, or account
- Auto-reconciled for the highest accuracy
In our beta test, founders and accountants told us this saves them hours every month, and just felt “magical”. We are looking for additional feedback on how we can make it better.
Just a few heads up:
- The automation does not work for usage-based revenue or asset-based revenue.
- You can create and generate revenue schedules manually. Stripe just makes automation and cash reconciliation so easy.
Congrats @sasha_orloff and team on the launch.
We've been using Puzzle for a few months and love all the key founder friendly features. It highlights all the metrics startups need upfront and trims out all the painful admin with bookkeeping.
Some favorites are the powerful auto-categorization of expenses, the simple email summary of money-in and money-out is extremely helpful, MRR/ARR views, and the multiple views of burn. The burn feature is super valuable for founders and that alone is worth the signup.
As background, when I setup the account to test, I DM'd Sasha on Twitter. He replied and setup calls with us and their team to help learn about how we have been using the platform. So not only is it a tool for founders but - Puzzle is practicing what they preach as a startup.
10/10 recommend and I'm hopeful Puzzle can unseat Quickbooks over the next 5 years
@stvmcg love this! Giving you the Pixel Perfection award for such an amazing comment.
Appreciate the note. Now just have to figure out how to make 5 years happen faster! ha ha.
I just started using Puzzle last month and it's really quite good. I'm moving over from Bench. When I expressed interest in Puzzle, Luke Frye, their CX head, reached out and personally answered questions and helped me onboard. Now, my transactions get categorized instantly and I get to see an always up-to-date Runway Run Rate, which in THIS economy, is quite helpful 😅
@temirlan The only thing better than our product is Luke!
Appreciate your support. Let us know what else we can build for you to make Puzzle better for your needs. A lot more automation coming soon!
@lukefrye I think an important part of helping founders not have to feel like imposters is knowing we are here to help support them.
You do an amazing job here.
Great job on the launch @hungryhelen!
Does Puzzle also integrate with other payment platforms apart from Stripe? What type of reports and data analysis does Puzzle have?
Keep up the great work and congratulations to the entire Puzzle team.
@gusoliveira_ thanks!! 🙌
What payment platform do you use?
At this time, Puzzle works best with Stripe, and when using Puzzle <> Stripe integration - the experience is effortless and automated 🦾
If you do not have a Stripe account, you will still get cash revenue based on bank transactions and can set up invoices in Puzzle to schedule accrual revenue. But, MRR/ARR is currently limited to Stripe users.
Since Puzzle is a core accounting platform, we offer standard financial reports like P&L, Balance Sheet, Trial Balance, General Ledger, and Cash Activity Report. You can also find a snapshot of your total cash, burn, and runway on your Puzzle dashboard.
Hope that clarifies, and keep the questions coming - woohoo!
@hungryhelen@gusoliveira_ Thanks for the comment. We tend to add integrations by customer demand, so let us know what else you use and we can explore.
Data ingestion options:
1. Stripe is automated and beautiful, reconciled to cash.
2. You can always interim upload a CSV of the transaction report
3. You can itemize the bank deposit
4. You can let us know what you use and we can explore
Reports are accounting, and more. Specific to revenue:
1. Revenue by cash
2. Revenue by accruals
3. Revenue by customer
4. Revenue by product
5. MRR table
6. ARR
7. ARR by customer
8. Revenue by GL account
9. Variance by %
10. Variance by $
Let us know what else we can build for you!
@emilia_korczynska1 Totally!
When accounting software was built in the 90s, you made money by selling an item.
Revenue has changed over time - subscriptions, prepaid enterprise contracts, customers upgrading and downgrading products, etc.
This complexity didn’t exist then. It exists now.
Archaic accounting systems have not caught up. So the only solution you know is to do it manually, in spreadsheets, in one-off queries.
In today's fast-paced world, automation in revenue reporting is not just a convenience— it's a necessity.
The more you can automate routine tasks like accounting - the more time you have to focus on growing your business, developing products, and engaging with customers 🙌
@emilia_korczynska1
It was SUCH a hassle, we agree!
We worked for almost a year to make this simply effortless. If there is anything we can do to improve it, please let us know.
Hey @sentry_co! Not yet, but if you want us to build this for you, we can! We do have a sick AI categorizer feature that sends you emails that you can reply to directly with a category and any other context related to your transaction and Puzzle's AI will handle the rest. Check it out https://puzzle.io/product 🙌
@hungryhelen It would add some modularity to the product. Like I use google analytics. But I get most value from it in our slack integration. Essentially products are API's and users build lego with them. Just an idea. Feel free to validate if there are more people that would need it. ✌️
@sentry_co Oops, my bad! To clarify, we do indeed have a Slack integration available (our Head of Product is smiling now that I'm giving the team the credit they deserve 🤣)
User feedback like yours is incredibly valuable in shaping the direction of our product development. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and we're eagerly looking forward to hearing more of your feedback on Puzzle! 😊👍
If you have more ideas or questions, please let us know. We're here to make your life a little easier! ✌️
The ability to automatically and instantaneously see key startups metrics is - shockingly - a game changer. Prior to Puzzle, to see this data, founders would likely need to hire an expensive CFO or bookkeeper/accountant and have them report this data - not in real-time - to you.
We live in a world that moves much faster. Accurate financial data at your fingertips is a critical component of intelligent founder decision-making.
Accounting has been a subject of fear for founders during the entire Quickbooks era. As Stripe and Gusto did to payments and payroll, I expect Puzzle to do the same for Accounting.
@ashrust If we could do this in just a few months, imagine what we will do over the next year. What motivates us? We are startup founders ourselves, and this was just so unnecessarily frustrating!
@marceire It's all about the founders, cause we are founders too. We started off so no founder has to feel like an imposter when it comes to finance. It took a year to build, and get it down to one integration for founders. But excited to show it's possible!
@marceire founders start companies to innovate, disrupt, and chase dreams — not to get lost in accounting. we’ve all been there. so glad we’re finally doing something about it!
Always fun seeing the tools that are genuinely mission critical to our company on product hunt. Gives me a chance to yell my love from the rooftops. I hate accounting, I hate finance, I hate bookkeeping (the activity of bookkeeping that is - the word bookkeeping is one of my favorites, three double letters in a row!!)
But I love Puzzle. More than I thought it was possible to love accounting software. Genuinely don't know what we'd do without it. The runway feature and the weekly summary emails are indispensable.
@anteloper We agree! Nobody loves the work, but it's so important. Let us know what else we can build for you! Else we are just going to focus on making it faster, with less effort!
Real time data, easy reporting. This is a no brainer for early stage companies to get a grasp on their financial metrics. Investors need to make this a requirement for their portcos!
I've known and have been working with @sasha_orloff and his team for years and wow, the progress they make is incredible. The brand, the product, the culture... its all A+.
@sasha_orloff and team Puzzle 🧩 is such a power boost for founders - especially those of us commercial founders with non-existent accounting expertise 😅
Nothing makes me happier than seeing revenue roll in - but that would quickly disappear when I'd remember the excess tabs of spreadsheets waiting for me to close books at the end of the month 🤯
The ability to understand my metrics and real-time financial health at a glance - as well as share that with investors, auditors, or our team internally - is quite literally a game-changer.
🚀 Founders, this ones for us!!!
@alan_mwangi "game changer" is a phrase we see a lot when folks familiar with excel laden workflows see this and understand that this massively reduce in context switching and creates a single source of truth.
We have set out to make accounting cool and couldn't have asked for a better team to do this with. Incredibly proud of what we have done so far. Go Puzzle!