We had our webinar with Gappify co-founder and CEO Jotham Ty to dive into the future of accounting automation. In the webinar, we covered topics ranging from how Jotham started Gappify, his journey as an accountant turned founder, what it’s like working with accounting teams in the most innovative companies, gaps in the world of accounting automation and accounting software and how he’s seen the space evolve in the last 20 years being in the industry.

It was a dynamic discussion and we had 3 key takeaways amongst many other tidbits and insights (watch the full recording here).

Evolution from single source to best in class solutions to next-gen startups

The evolution of the industry in the last few years started with NetSuite as the first cloud software which made it very easy for any company to get started and up to speed with NetSuite. Since then, we’ve seen various players take on various parts of the workflows as point solutions that integrate with NetSuite whether that’s Bill.com for bill pay and payments or Avalara for taxes or Coupa for procurement.

More recently in the last 5 years, we’ve also seen next gen startups like Ramp, Brex, Divvy, Airbase, Melio, TaxJar and these new age companies come about to take on these incumbents as challengers with better user experience, integrations and workflows.

A lot more manual processes yet to be automated within accounting

Following the evolution that he’s noticed the last few years, Jotham believes that we’re still in the early days and that there’s still a lot of opportunity to build in accounting automation in the next few years.

Most companies have started out focused on common business processes that are focused on workflows that are cross-functional and touch multiple stakeholders like expense management, accounts payables, accounts receivables and more. But Jotham pointed out how 80%+ of the workflows and to-dos of an accountant looking to do reporting and close their books are still all very manual whether its doing accruals, figuring out sales tax, multi currencies, payroll and more. He believes that all these workflows are ripe for disruption given all the compliance and audit rules that accountants need to deal with.

Getting accountants to adoption automation requires building trust and educating accounting teams

When asked about the early days of building Gappify and how he was able to gain the trust of big enterprises, Jotham talked about how his background as an accountant having run his own practice and having worked closely with these FP&A teams helped him build the initial trust.

He talked about accountants are focused on their day to day tasks and are always chasing tight deadlines that its very hard for them to spend time evaluating technologies so he encourages any teams in the space to be partners to accounting teams and first build trust by educating them on best practices and helping them see how automation can help them.

Today, Gappify works with companies like Stripe, Reddit, Databricks, Opendoor and more helping power their accrual automation.

Rutter sits in the intersection of ecommerce and accounting where we help companies build integrations to these various platforms through our Universal Ecommerce and Accounting API.

If you’re a developer or company looking to build on top of accounting or ecommerce APIs, Rutter has built a Universal API that helps companies integrate with Netsuite, Quickbooks, Xero, Zoho, Sage, Freshbooks, Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, and more using one unified API. Learn more here.