I’m Andrew Playford, a chartered accountant (UK) and a CFO.
I have spent more than 25 years as a CFO in the United States, most of it at consumer brands with inventory: products made in one place, sold through Shopify, the marketplaces and retail, and accounted for on Fulfil, NetSuite or QuickBooks. The finance work at a brand like that is mostly mechanical, and the people doing it are mostly too good for it.
I run an accounting firm, Proper CFO, that does this work for brands between ten and a hundred million in sales. Pursor is the platform we built to run it on. The agents code the bank and card lines, tie payouts to orders and payments to bills, reconcile every account, prepare the month-end journals, build the cashflow and file the sales tax. The people at the firm handle what needs judgement, and sign.
The agents do the routine work. People make the judgement calls.
Pursor sits on the ledger the client already has. Nothing migrates and nothing is replaced. Every read of a source is recorded, every write to a ledger is claimed before it is made and confirmed afterwards, and every entry carries a description that says why. A firm can show a client, or an auditor, exactly what was done and on what evidence.
The client sees everything and answers only the few things that are theirs: what a charge was, whether to pay early, the stock count. Nobody at the client keys a journal or answers a notice. The firm is the only hand on the books, and the firm is accountable for them.
Pursor was built in collaboration with several clients, on real ledgers, and every rule the agents follow was learned from a real month-end. It is not sold to businesses on its own. It is offered to accounting firms that want to run their clients on it, branded for the firm and powered by Pursor.
Two things that will not change.
The ledger stays the ledger. Pursor is not a second set of books, and a client who leaves takes a clean ledger with them.
Autonomy is earned by evidence, not assumed. A writer runs unattended only once it has been proven on a live ledger, every write stays correctable, and the controls on what the agents may do belong to the firm.
If your firm serves brands like these and would rather spend its hours on judgement than on keying, let’s talk.
Andrew Playford
Founder, Pursor