The bank feed is the killer app of cloud accounting. Cloud accounting was available for several years before the bank feed but it failed to get mainstream adoption. The bank feed changed everything.

Why? The bank feed was so powerful because it reduced the amount of bookkeeping work and significantly improved the timeliness of the books. The bank feed meant that any business, big or small, could now review yesterday’s financial performance rather than last month’s.

Since the bank feed became commonplace other “feeds” have become available. Receipt Bank and Expensify pioneered turning expenses and AP into a feed, Stripe, Shopify and others turned AR into a feed, payroll systems moved to the cloud and turned payroll data into a feed. This is the trend that enables predictions like this:

“A modern accounting system will be a series of queries on a data warehouse fed by APIs, not a hand-reconciled general ledger assembled by a team of staff accountants.”

Tomasz Tunguz

We believe that the core of a modern finance system is a data platform that imbibes all the traditional lagging financial data such as accounting, bank, payroll, etc, but also has leading financial data such as CRM and sales pipeline data.

This is what we are building at Translucent.