Finance Bought Ledgers Instead of Workspaces

Every finance team I’ve worked with runs on three systems: an ERP, a spreadsheet, and someone’s inbox.

Only two of those are software.

The third is where most of the work actually happens, and it’s the reason finance teams feel perpetually behind.

I spent three years as an accounting associate at one of the largest public universities in Ghana before I ever worked in tech. The lesson from that seat has stayed with me: the ERP never tells you what the work is. It tells you what the work was, after someone else has already done it somewhere else.

The actual work is chasing a vendor for a missing invoice. Reconciling a payment that came in under a slightly different name. Figuring out why last month’s recon has three mismatches that no one has touched in two weeks. Rebuilding the context of a conversation that happened between three people in Slack, your counterpart’s inbox, and a phone call you weren’t on.

None of that lives in the ERP. None of it lives anywhere, really.

Sales teams solved this problem decades ago. A CRM is not a database of customers. It’s the system that remembers where every conversation stopped, who owns the next step, and what the state of every deal is. Engineering solved it with Linear. Support solved it with Zendesk.

Finance never did. Not because finance is less complex. Because finance bought ledgers instead of workspaces, and mistook one for the other.

The consequence is that every finance team I’ve watched operate, from a small outfit in Lagos to a multi-country treasury function, loses most of its hours to coordination rather than to accounting. I’ve always said accounting is often the easy part. The coordination is where the close stretches from 3 days to 12.

I don’t think this is a software gap. I think it’s a category gap.

What finance is missing isn’t a better ERP or a smarter chatbot over the data. It’s a layer that holds workflow state across the tools the work already happens in. Email, chat, the ERP, the spreadsheet. One memory across all of them.

This will get built. And I suspect the teams that get there first will be the ones with the least ERP tech debt to unwind in the first place. Which probably means the smaller teams. And probably, eventually, the ones furthest from where the ERP companies were originally designed for.