How Rooled and Numeric Use AI to Drive Efficiency 

This transcript was AI-generated. Please excuse any typos.


We hear a lot about how AI is making work more efficient these days. For instance, imagine if you could close the books on your business faster each and every month and get back to actually generating and running your business. Today we talk to the team in finance and accounting that is using AI to actually make that happen.

Welcome back to another edition of the Angel Nest. I’m David Hemenway with Johnny Walker from Ruled, outsource CFO and accounting services. Ruled are the startup finance experts.

Today we welcome Parker Gilbert. He’s the CEO of Numeric. Numeric uses AI to help companies be more efficient and close their books faster.

Thanks to you both for joining today. Thank you. Thank you.

It’s wonderful to be here. Yeah, really great. Thank you again, Parker.

Parker, tell us about Numeric. Yeah, so we started Numeric about four years ago. And I think a lot of the company was sort of based on my experiences running a finance function at a startup, going through, I think, a lot of the pains that people do from, you know, being very early revenue to scaling complexity, scaling entities, scaling into audits, scaling into different geos.

And, you know, at its core, I think, you know, when we think about Numeric, our goal is to help finance and accounting teams utilize their financial data more effectively, I think, to drive businesses forward. And I think the first thing that has to happen is that data needs to be correct. It needs to be accurate.

It needs to be delivered on time and as efficiently as possible. And hopefully with this little legwork, you know, being done by people behind the scenes, processing information, validating things, staring and comparing at different documents to make it happen. And so that’s what we do.

So as a company, we’ve raised about $40 million to date from investors like Founders Fund, Venlo Ventures, IVP, 8VC, and others. And we have a couple of hundred customers today that range from large public companies like Figure who recently IPO’d, Figma who recently IPO’d, Brex and many other amazing companies, which has been a privilege. And our goal here is to just kind of deliver the best products on the market, you know, when it comes to helping accountants in practice, move faster, utilize AI more effectively.

And hopefully, I think if we are successful, try and sort of champion a real shift in what it looks like to do accounting at a very basic level, you know, in a corporate setting. And I know you and Johnny are partnering on that. So let’s talk a little bit about the ruled partnership.

Yeah, no, we’re thrilled to be a partner with Park & Numeric. I think, you know, for our perspective in coming to the market with accounting services and really looking to be tech forward, what’s critical is that we have a very scalable infrastructure internally. And our tech stack, as we refer to it, has to encompass the accounting engagement management and the month close and all the things that Parker’s been referring to there.

We, of course, have other platforms that circle around. There’s the ledgers, which we’ll come to, I’m sure, in the discussion here. But what’s absolutely critical is this element of the different schedules, work papers, audit readiness, like that fundamental foundation has to be there and has to be robust, has to be reliable.

And I think from the moment that we met Parker & Numeric, you could see that there was this scalability in the platform from being able to get going with small clients, which is very important for us, and then be able to scale to the much larger clients. And I think Parker’s customer base essentially proves that thesis out. And we hear so much about how AI is making people more efficient, but I’m not sure that most of us really understand how that’s actually happening, Parker.

Can you tell us how you’re applying that and how it’s working? Yeah, I think it’s something which… Look, I think it’s probably a more interesting time than ever to be building a company when it feels like the ground is just moving on a daily, weekly basis around what’s possible. I think there’s a lot of talk and a lot of interest and demand to understand how is AI going to impact every field. And I think it’s hard to be in a conversation with a finance team and not talk about it.

I have… My belief is AI is not going to solve accounting. I think the more time we spend working with customers, dealing with complexity, I think there is a… I think it needs to be a grounded belief, which is you have to build really good software. You have to understand deeply what are the core problems, whether it’s in ledgering data and reporting.

But AI is going to play a big role in how people interact with those systems, how people are almost spending their time in their software. And so if you think about today in a world where maybe people are spending… I don’t know. Johnny could give a shared perspective on this.

An accountant working on a client, maybe they’re spending half of their time processing transactions, building schedules, booking adjustments. All of that work sits in the middle work, which is the data has come in and now we are processing it. I think that work all goes away because of AI over time.

And I think you see work pushed to either end of that spectrum, which is either people are administering their systems, they are dealing with exceptions, they are dealing with… The work almost becomes almost more software engineering oriented, which is, oh, something has changed about our business. How are we going to go retool our systems? We just signed our first lease. What do we do about that? How do we manage that? How do we want to go account for that? It’s also going to shift to the far end of that, which is how do we advise our clients? How do we think about the impact that this data can have on the business? How does the data that we want, how does that inform how we set up our systems in the first place? And so I think you will see a lot of the work sort of jut out to sort of those sides of the spectrum, whereas a lot of the work today sort of is taken up in the middle part, which is just getting to those numbers being done.

Just booking sort of adjustments, which it seems crazy today that you’d have people booking journal entries from schedules where nothing has changed in a period, yet we’re still sitting there sort of booking something. So I think there will be very real differences, but I also want to caution the sense that like, I think it’s too easy or too simplistic to just slap AI on and be like, oh, AI is going to just do the job. It’s like there is a lot of depth to the sophistication of systems, of tooling, of understanding of complex accounting workflows, I think, to really enable that AI to have an impact.

Yeah, I’d agree with everything that, Parker, you’ve said there. And I think that one of the concepts, again, it’s an often used term, you hear AI and agentic AI all the time, but you also hear human in the loop. And I think that’s from our perspective, and I don’t think it’s a case of us justifying why we still need to exist.

I think it’s a fundamental component of a human intuition and experience being applied and overseeing what these systems underneath are actually doing. Because I agree completely that there’s a whole bunch of tasks where what an individual accountant or FP&A or whatever are doing is that they’re seeking data from disparate systems and trying to bring together to then post a transaction or to come to a conclusion on some particular problem or solution. AI could definitely sift through all that and present pre-filtered data that would take a lot of increased efficiency hugely, but it’s still human in the loop.

Because at the end of the day, somebody is there going to say, yes, that’s the right answer. That’s the thing that we should now post to the ledger. And I think it’s that human in the loop element, which it sounds like we’re in concert with you on that point, that AI will have a lot to offer, but you still need this guidance, top level, from somebody who knows what’s actually going on.

I completely agree. And I think especially when you think about some level of, just even simply the controls, the expectations that auditors are going to have. I don’t think we should be looking for sort of vibe accounting where we’re just letting the systems run wild.

They will go make mistakes. They will operate non-deterministically. You don’t want something getting booked differently for three months in a row.

And that’s where I think there is that, again, that role of it’s like, I think the AI tools would be very good at sort of directing information to different places. Oh, that looks like a rent payment. We should apply it to this rent schedule that you have.

Oh, maybe this looks like a new fixed asset you purchased. Okay, we haven’t seen this thing before. Maybe we need you here, right? It’s about sort of like, how do you kind of sort of direct the information to the right places, to the right schedules, to the right treatments, deal with exceptions.

But I think that sort of middle part is still just like really good software at the end of the day. Very effective at sort of then doing that sort of recurring processing. Yep, agreed.

It strikes me that the opportunity may not be in what people are so focused on, which is, you know, perhaps saving money. It’s great to do tasks more efficiently. But when you think about how else you can deploy those resources, right? Johnny and I have done other episodes where we’ve talked with people who have really talked about having accounting and finance integrated into the businesses so that folks are not operating in separate silos, but everybody is kind of pulling in the same direction.

And now you’re taking all of those resources that you used to have chasing down crazy stuff, like what you’re talking about, Parker, and now all of a sudden people are actually using all of that energy to expand the business. Yep, exactly, exactly. No, I think it’s a critical… Well, Ziva, in conversations earlier on today, it’s a world that we are in now where that data is so much more accessible across the company that you now have the opportunity for platforms to get developed that really can leverage that and then bring that to you as an operator needing to do a particular task.

Your job just becomes more efficient. And I think that benefits, obviously, the company overall. Now, how are you seeing clients adapt to this new world? Are they reluctant to change their systems? Oh, candidly, I think we see the whole spectrum.

You know, we see some companies coming in who are at the cutting edge and partners at the cutting edge who want to push on what’s possible. We certainly also hear skepticism and concern and hesitations. And I think those are very natural changes of how, you know, when jobs have changed meaningfully.

There’s always been folks sort of hammering on the, well, that’s not how I did it coming up through the ranks kind of like, you know, sort of perspective. So we see all of it. But I think it has been a unique privilege to get to work with some leading AI companies, you know, even as customers who are just pushing the boundaries every day and are pushing us to go think about what’s possible and how do we get ahead of the curve.

But I think you see every emotion and reaction under the sun. Yeah. Do we know yet what the boundaries are? I mean, what do you think is, what do you think this is going to look like in five years? Yeah, it’s a good question.

I would probably argue that we probably don’t know what the bounds look like. You know, I think we know what the next, you know, two years kind of look like, or at least sort of like what the next coming years look like, you know, absent sort of any like new, like really groundbreaking sort of breakthrough, right? You know, if like we’re working on LLMs and those LLMs are getting better and better, but they’re sort of fundamentally doing the same thing they are today. I think in five years time, I think to return to this theme, I think we’re seeing these sort of role of finance and accounting roles kind of like compounding together.

I think we will see more, almost like quasi full stack teams where there isn’t that sort of divide between, you know, who’s an accountant and who’s a finance role. I think you will see more of the kind of blurring of those lines. I think you are gonna see systems where they are almost principally designed for AI tools to manipulate them, to compose them, to build them, to manage them.

And again, there are humans in the loops, but those humans are mostly dealing with exceptions and they’re mostly the new information and context that’s been introduced. And that’s super exciting. So I think the world will look very different.

I think accounting is not the place today where it’s like, you know, it’s like we’ve seen this in coding and sort of writing code. We’ve seen this in writing content. Those are industries where it’s like they’ve been turned on their head overnight.

I don’t think accounting is the same. I think it’s quite different. But it’s gonna be fun and it’s gonna be super exciting.

And I think like, again, it’s like there’s been no better time to go be working on things like this because the level of creativity and imagination about how do we rethink some of these workflows or even systems of record is super exciting. Yeah, I think one of the, Justin, you comparing then to the AI and how it’s disrupted other industries is the LLMs and all the training mechanism methods that they’ve been using have been able to leverage public data. So there’s been a lot of text.

There’s been a lot of code. It’s all been on GitHub. So they’ve been able to use those resources to then train the models on what are the typical methods of, and they just, so they can do inference better.

They can come up with this sort of recommendations that are more likely to be valid. And I think the issue with companies is that all of the financial processes essentially are private. And so there’s not been any, from an LLM or model training standpoint, they haven’t had data in order to build a train on how companies actually work internally.

And so A, do you agree, if I’ve said it right, do you agree with that? And B, when you think about AI sort of being applied, it kind of has to learn how a company works in order to then provide some valid sort of result from any kind of inference type activity. Would you agree with that? I would agree with that. And I would say, I would sort of add one thing to it, which I think the sort of whole CFO stack sort of today suffers from the fact that mostly we continue to operate in a world that’s kind of, wasn’t designed for this sort of like data-centric systems that I think net numerically are now building to try and introduce.

Like the ERPs that were built 20, 30 years ago were really designed around a journal entry being the central unit, the credit and debit. They weren’t built around this notion that whether it’s credit card data, bank data, payroll data, commission data, right? Like all this information is now out there. It’s a lot of it is structured.

AI introduces the way to actually take unstructured or semi-structured data and use it more. So I actually think it’s, that data layer of like, how do these things get unified? How do they get reconciled? How do they get managed? I think that needs to exist to go kind of bring forward the next set of AI tools that can be used effectively. I don’t think you can just go introduce AI without some of that sort of more data engineering that has to happen.

Yeah, yeah, got it, okay. I can actually just picking up on one thing you mentioned there, the ledgers. There’s a lot of activity on new ledgers right now.

There’s a clearly a market opportunity that people sense, which is generally disrupting the large enterprise players in various different spaces. So when you look at that market and how Numeric’s gonna, how are you gonna react or evolve as these new platforms come to market? What do you think generally might happen in that ledger area? But we’d love your insights on that side too. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really exciting.

I mean, I think like, I think we’ve seen more activity and more investment in accounting software in the last six months than maybe we’ve seen in the last six years, which I think is amazing. I think it’s sort of a reflection of the fact that many of the same problems that I think we’ve identified some years ago, I think are getting a lot of attention. I think the thesis is largely correct, which is like there is real pain and there’s real constraints that are introduced to the CFO stack at large, but also the whole business because of how sort of disjointed and fragmented I think a lot of the sort of accounting ledgers and systems and data has been.

So I think in an exciting way, I think there’s gonna be room for a lot of different players to go solve these problems. I think you will see lots of different segmentations that we’ve sort of seen and I think for good reason kind of occur. The SMB sort of QuickBooks world of today is very, very different than the mid-market world, is very, very different than the enterprise world.

The problems, the systems, the users, the customers, the go-to-market motions, all of those things really do change as you think about those sort of like different segments. And so I’m really excited because I do think there’s gonna be sort of people introducing new ideas, new products, pushing all that’s possible, innovating faster. And I think that benefits everyone, ourselves included.

So I know a lot of those folks personally, it’s been really exciting to see their kind of growth and I think the next few years are gonna be great for the end users, hopefully. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And these kinds of partnerships that you guys are forging, and Johnny, I know you have a lot of partnerships in this area.

It just seems like they’re gonna be absolutely essential going forward. I mean, the old style accountant who’s sitting there with his adding machine or whatever the PC equivalent of that is, it’s gonna be hard to see how they’re gonna be competitive. Exactly.

I think what you said there, David, and Parker, what you’re referencing there, there’ve been a lot of incumbents that have been in the industry for a long time. So I think it’s almost been, it’s been a benefit to accountants. They haven’t had to address different technologies.

Now you’re in a world where I think the companies that are our type that are gonna be competitive are ones that have to be very tech savvy. They have to develop to their own expertise on it, perhaps even their own IP. They’ve got a tech stack that they can really defend and find that they are competitive with.

And they will have to continually address improvements in that as they go. Because I don’t think it will stay static. Like you’re gonna see evolvements and you’ve got to get very comfortable with how you use the data, how you transition from one platform to another.

And then of course, where there are platforms that just exist with you throughout like Numeric. So yeah, it’s an exciting time. I think we’re gonna see a lot of evolution in the people in the industry too.

Parker, tell us what the next year looks like for Numeric and for your partnership with Ruled. Oh man, so I mean, I think first of all, I think we totally agree. I think these partnerships are so important.

And I think the, I would put forward, I think we will see companies for longer than ever sort of working hand in hand with partners, deferring sort of bringing finance and accounting roles in house. Because I think the quality of service, I think the efficiency of service, I think those are all gonna just continue to be up leveled as they kind of have been over the last decade or two. But I think that it will accelerate as you see good AI tools and sort of experts and people pushing the boundaries there.

But like all systems, like all these industries too, I think you’re gonna see firms like Ruled pushing the boundaries and being rewarded for it. And I think they’re gonna be firms who are also gonna be slower and probably like not be as effective or efficient. I’m really excited about the next year.

I think this, like the last 12 months have been kind of a whirlwind for Numeric. We’ve grown our headcount, you know, 3X. We’ve, it feels like I’m a recruiter 80% of the time.

Sometimes it feels like, you know, we are kind of barely keeping up with just the, you know, our, the customer growth and sort of, which has been a blast. I think we have a really ambitious roadmap for the next year. I think we really wanna push on a lot of what we’ve been doing, but go two or three steps even farther.

Parker Gilbert from Numeric, Johnnie Walker from Ruled, my very frequent podcast partner. Thank you both so much. Yeah, thank you both.

I really appreciate it. Thank you very much indeed, Parker. Thank you again, David.

Appreciate it. You can find contact information for our guests today at our website, theangelnest.com, where you can also reach me if you know of an interesting topic or a company that we should talk about. We produce The Angel Nest with help from Rob Higley and Mike Bognar, who is on the controls today at CDM Studios at the historic Art Deco Film Center building just west of Times Square in New York.

I’m David Hemingway. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.