Ground Truth in Accounting

Please meet our new investment: Trullion

Digitization has been slow to reach the services sector of the economy. Professions such as law, accounting and consulting have, for the most part, avoided disruption. In fact, in certain ways, their hold on customers and the customers’ wallet has strengthened. Some of that stranglehold is due to regulation and some is due to customer fear of the consequences of digitization.

These are enormous industries with all of the trappings of something that should be disrupted by technology. They are large, slow to adapt, costly and viewed as a necessary evil. The area I have been most intrigued by is accounting. Somehow it keeps messing up but still reaps the benefits. The more times accountants overlook issues, contributing to situations such as Enron or the 2008 financial crisis, the more the regulators enact rules to ensure accountants have more business. I have often referred to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as the Universal Accountant Employment Act.

Nothing shows this tendency more than the audit. Audits have become more expensive, less comprehensive (sampling rules with little ground truth) and everyone knows the competency level of the lower-level auditors has gone down. It is the worst kept secret in CFO and CAO circles. Add to that the fact that new accounting regulations are being introduced in a host of areas of accounting… and you have a recipe for disruption.

The Wirecard scandal caused me to finally write something about this situation in an attempt to find an entrepreneur who was focused on finding solutions. My friend Alex Oppenheimer reached out after this tweet and said I ought to meet Isaac Heller of Trullion.

The truth is, we had met Isaac 6–8 months before and were unsure about his approach to the market, but Alex said that good things were happening and he was right. Isaac and team have picked a really interesting entry point: new accounting regulations like lease accounting and revenue recognition. The need for ground truth and proper accounting of leases is driven by a regulatory change and it is a royal pain in the neck for CFOs and CAOs. Together with his partner Amir Boldo, who left Silverfort to join Isaac at Trullion, they have brought machine learning and the beginnings of AI to solving the data bridge between documents and “spreadsheets.” In place of Excel and macros, their modern application and infrastructure is a godsend for CFOs and CAOs. Try it; you will agree.

I think this ties into a broader theme around disaggregating Excel. More importantly, however, Trullion creates business transparency to power real-time visibility into company financials. Trullion is building a single source of truth for CFOs and accountants, alleviating the need for sampling and increasing the quality of an audit while decreasing costs. It is useful for organizations of any size who have these upcoming accounting challenges.

We are excited to join with Greycroft in leading this round and thrilled that leading CFOs like Bob Mylod and Artie Minson have joined us. Trullion is recruiting fast in engineering and sales to keep up with demand, so feel free to reach out if you have what it takes.