In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone with a now famous presentation. The iPhone changed the world for many reasons but one of them was Job’s insight that people didn’t want a different device for each function. In his presentation he heralds the iPhone as three separate devices, "...an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator...", in one. This insight applies today to accounting and finance software.
The average finance team has 18 different vendors*.
This makes sense. The cloud transformed what software could achieve and how workflows could be completed. Thousands of founders around the world spotted problems that could be solved and solved them, creating companies and becoming vendors to finance teams.
But the resulting ecosystem does not make sense. A finance team with 18 vendors has to deal with 18 different versions of their financial data, 18 different sets of permissions and access and 18 different user experiences and learnings to become proficient.
Although they were innovative when they launched several years ago, many software solutions are now effectively commodities. Each point solution having many competitors and each one with in essence the same offering. It should be possible for a modern finance team to get the solutions they need without:
- Having to deal with multiple account managers,
- Learning a new interface for every workflow,
- Keeping control of who can see and access of each solution,
- Trying to build a consistent set of numbers across all the solutions.
This is what we are building at Translucent.
*Translucent's research, March 2023
