The ERP is dead. Long live the SFP.

ERP systems are clunky, take forever to implement, have zero support, and offer a dubious ROI. A new category of software is needed to empower companies to run their financial flows with quick implementation times that automate instead of creating work. It needs to be devoted solely to financial management tasks such as consolidated and statutory reporting, bookkeeping, and accounting for multinational companies— historically reserved for the software category known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), a term and category we believe has outlived its purpose.

Initially designed to be all-encompassing business process suites, ERP systems were created primarily to serve the secondary sector of the economy (production), as industrial production grew rapidly from World War II until the great financial crises.

US industrial production, 1920-2024, St Louis Fred

The ERP category, enterprise-resource planning, was designed to run the end-to-end process planning from input to output. For example, an automobile manufacturer needed one place to manage everything from sourcing raw materials and ensuring enough employees are available for each shift to the final sales of the car.

However, as the global economy evolved, so did the needs of businesses, particularly in the rapidly growing service sector. Since the 2000s, the tertiary sector (the service sector at large) has grown by an order of magnitude compared to the production sector. However, modern successful service companies are forced to use a legacy ERP the moment they need to run their financial operations in more than one country. 

As the cloud and internet grew, the ERP category was first disrupted by Salesforce, which carved out the CRM function. Later came a series of products that carved out the HRM (led by Workday) and all the employee-related functions, leaving the ERP as a hollow husk. The fundamental reason for this is that a tight coupling between your sales and your material input is not needed for services companies. Tech companies can seamlessly scale their operations using cloud providers, while consulting firms primarily need to manage their human resources and equipment like laptops. These functions are better served by specialized systems rather than traditional ERPs.

To remediate the ‘husk’ problem of interfacing with a clunky category designed for the secondary sector, countless financial point solutions have been created for the tertiary sector. Accounts Receivables, Accounts Payables, FP&A, Procurement, Expense Management—the list goes on. Billions of dollars have been spent building, installing, and servicing products that patch over the underlying problems: the financial platforms of businesses are based on a husk of an outdated category. And this problem is particularly acute for the tertiary sector, which gets no benefit from the inventory, production planning, and supply chain capabilities.

The time is overdue for a better category to manage financials at modern companies. The Smart Financial Platform (SFP) is a product category dedicated to deeply solving the accounting, bookkeeping, reporting, and associated financial flows of businesses in the tertiary sector. With an SFP, international expansion no longer requires a $250,000 budget and a 15-month implementation project. Instead, it offers an automated accounting system that can answer queries directly through platforms like Slack.

To pave the way, we have launched Light, an AI-native SFP that solves the financial needs of multinational businesses—and solves them well. Light offers automated multi-currency bookkeeping, real-time financial reporting, and AI-powered pre-accounting, all accessible through user-friendly interfaces and integrations with popular business tools. We focus on automated bookkeeping for multinationals, with great products for AR, AP, simple, performant APIs - built on beautiful design and AI. We perform the sale, installation, and support for our clients.

With Light, the finance team can be power-users and build automations, workflows and configurations without being technical.