“Everything you need on AR, AP, and GL. Nothing more, nothing less.”

The gap in the market

“There’s a big gap in the market for financial platforms,” says KeyShot’s CFO. “You can either go really small, the e-conomics of the world, or you go all the way to NetSuite, SAP, Oracle. There’s really nothing in between.”

For a software business, the big ERPs are the wrong tool. “It’s too big, too slow, too complicated. Even though NetSuite calls themselves a cloud product, it’s an old-school on-prem system deployed in a cloud. It’s rigid, expensive, and not agile enough for what you need.”

What a SaaS company actually needs is narrower, and sharper. “You put best-of-breed tools around it, so you don’t need that much from a finance system. You just need it to run smooth and be really easy to integrate. That’s where Light comes in. Everything you need on AP, AR, and general ledger. Nothing more, nothing less.”

A co-development partnership

KeyShot was one of Light’s first wall-to-wall customers, going live on AP, AR, and GL together. “We entered into a co-development agreement,” the CFO explains. “We bring a lot of hands-on experience on what you need from a modern finance system, and Light enhances that with modern tooling and AI. It’s been a really good ping-pong.”

He’s candid that being early meant a bumpy start, and clear on why it was worth it. “I’d much rather have a bumpy implementation with a fantastic tool and a dedicated team behind it than a well-oiled process with a mediocre product and no commitment. All in all, it was pretty good, and we’re still bringing new features to market together.”

The downside risk was never large. “From a pure financial point of view a SaaS company is simple: a bit of revenue, a bit of payroll, some expenses. My fallback plan was, if this goes wrong, I bring in PwC for two months and redo it in NetSuite. So there was never a big risk, just a lot of hard work at worst.”

Finance, designed out of the way

His philosophy is unusual, and it’s exactly what an agentic platform enables. “As soon as finance becomes a workflow the organisation has to go through, we’re failing. I want to design finance away from finance, to be the service center in the background, bring the value when people need it, but never be the bottleneck.”

Light makes that possible by putting finance where people already work. “The whole company can post questions in Teams, and the Light agent answers. It can be the travel policy, whether a supplier has been paid, or a salesperson in front of a customer asking what the outstanding accounts receivable balance is. That takes a lot of pressure off finance and makes us available in a completely different way.”

AI on the accountant’s desk

The payoff isn’t just workflows, it’s bringing capabilities into finance that used to need an engineer. “In finance, nobody has the skillset to build RPAs or machine learning. Now I can get my accountant to build it through Light’s AI interface. For a repetitive bank-fee transaction, we just write a text command, this fee should be treated this way and posted here, and it generates the whole logic behind it. Then the auto-reconciliation works.”

He sees the same ease in day-to-day spend. “I use Light every day for travel. My card is on my phone, and the moment I transact it pings me in Teams to upload the receipt. I snap a photo or forward the email, and nine times out of ten the AI matches everything and posts it to the right account. One click and you’re done. Even a tip I’ve scribbled in my poor handwriting, Light matches it to the card receipt.”