Ramp Stack: Built in the room where the work actually happens

Stack was tested, refined, and rebuilt over months of working sessions with partner firms who are actually closing the books. This is what they told us, and what it means for every team closing the books.

Where accountants' hours actually go

Ask an accountant why they got into the profession and they'll tell you it wasn't to reconcile bank statements. It was to help a business understand its margins, its exposure, its trajectory. The close exists to enable that conversation. Somewhere along the way, it became the entire job.

This isn't a new problem. But the conditions around it have gotten harder. In recent years, more than 300,000 accountants and auditors left the workforce, marking a 17% reduction. The pipeline behind them is thinning too: accounting graduates are down 30% from a decade ago, and the number of people sitting for the CPA exam has fallen by the same margin since 2016. The profession is being compressed from both ends.

They left because too little of their time was spent doing the valuable part. Too much went to downloading payroll reports, rolling forward schedules, and matching transactions line by line. They trained for advisory work, for judgment calls, for the kind of strategic conversation that only a skilled accountant can have. They found a profession that needed those skills, and then watched their hours disappear into the work that had to get done before any of that could happen. The work that fills the week isn't the work that drew anyone to the profession.

General-purpose AI has made the problem more visible without actually resolving it. The tools can draft commentary, summarize documents, answer accounting questions. What they can't do is live inside a client's actual books, carry memory of how this firm does things, produce output a reviewer can trace, or run consistently across a team on twenty engagements at once. The workaround is real, but the gap it’s bridging is structural.

Tyler Otto had been watching this cycle for years at Specialized Accounting. Johannes Sinnhuber at airCFO saw it in every firm he talked to. Dana McMillon, a fractional controller at JColeman Consulting, was living it across a roster of clients with different rules, different systems, and none of it connected.

They were three of the 20+ firms that joined the first cohort of a design partner program built to answer a single question: what does accounting AI actually need to work in the real world? The program hasn't stopped since.

Designed by the profession, not just for it

Most software companies build in private. They run surveys, analyze tickets, and ship. That's not how Ramp Stack was built.

The design partner program that shaped this product began with a first cohort of accounting firms spanning every shape of practice: fractional controllers, outsourced bookkeeping shops, virtual CFO firms, and regional CPA practices. It has continued to grow since. What defined it wasn't the size of the cohort. It was what we asked of them: real client engagements, in person and over Zoom, with actual books open and actual close deadlines bearing down. Firms ran live reconciliations. They onboarded clients. They built and broke the skills that encode their own processes. They found what didn't work and said so directly. Every session fed back into the product.

What came back wasn't a list of feature requests. It was a set of convictions. Firms didn't want to replace their people. They wanted their existing teams to handle more. They needed to see an agent's reasoning before they'd trust its output. Hard-coded numbers with no formula trail were a non-starter. And they needed to know that the processes they built inside the product would remain theirs: not visible to clients, not shared with other firms, not used to train the models the product runs on.

Each conviction changed something. The reviewability concern drove formula-based workpapers, so every number an agent produces traces back to its source the way a well-prepared manual workpaper would. The intellectual property concern led to firm-level permissions that keep each firm's processes scoped to their own workspace. And session to session, the product improved against what firms had raised, often visibly enough that the partners who flagged an issue could see it resolved the next time they came in.

Tyler Otto, Johannes Sinnhuber, and Dana McMillon each represent a different dimension of what we heard. But the product they helped shape is the product every firm in that room helped make.

We asked them to break it

Tyler Otto runs Specialized Accounting, a 15-person firm handling some of the most complex hospitality clients in the country: large hotels, restaurants, and marinas where a single month-end close can span multiple locations, layers of labor allocation, and cost-split rules that live only in the team's heads. When we asked him to work with us, he didn't come in gently.

"I said, 'Ramp, don't hold back. I want to try and break this thing.' Anytime I found an issue, it wasn't 'you used it wrong.' It was 'we can fix that.' That's the engineering process over and over: try, break, fix."
— Tyler Otto, Specialized Accounting

One of his most important early concerns was intellectual property. A firm's processes are its competitive advantage, and handing them to a platform you don't control is a real risk. Tyler said so directly and watched it get addressed.

"Our intellectual property, all the processes and systems we built — Ramp is taking that seriously. That was one of the main feedback points I was honestly skeptical about early on, but they took it seriously and ran with it."
— Tyler Otto, Specialized Accounting

That kind of feedback changed the product. Today, Specialized Accounting closes months more than 50% faster for some clients. And the time recovered isn't going to overhead.

For Tyler, the number matters less than what it makes possible. His clients are complex hospitality businesses that have historically gotten bare-bones reporting. Now they're getting labor-margin analysis, utility-cost allocations, and the kind of profitability insights that actually help them run their business. Not only did the close get faster, the work got better.

She closed March in a parking lot

Dana McMillon manages a fractional controller practice across clients with complex revenue schedules, Stripe deposits split across subsidiaries, and payroll rules that live only in her head. Until recently she managed all of it with Google Sheets, Post-it notes, and calendar reminders. By her own description, she is not a tester.

Her first real test came on the way to her son's basketball game. She and a team member had spent hours building a client's sales tax calculator by hand: pulling QuickBooks reports, running VLOOKUPs, summarizing across multiple tabs. She uploaded the spreadsheet from the parking lot. Twenty minutes later, March was done. She saved it as a Skill. The next month finished in minutes.

She'd spent years assuming that certain work just took the time it took. You build the sales tax calculator by hand because that's how it gets done. You roll the schedule forward because someone has to. That was the job. What the parking lot taught her was that it didn't have to be.

"Ramp Stack isn’t just another tool layered on top of our existing processes and workflows. It's actually streamlining and centralizing the work itself. It removes so many of the manual steps and interruptions that currently exist in our workflows, and that's what makes Ramp Stack feel so much more robust." — Dana McMillon, JColeman Consulting

Now it belongs to Stack. Dana is a controller. She trained to help businesses understand themselves: their margins, their exposure, where they're building and where they're bleeding. The hours that used to go to getting the books ready to analyze can go to the analysis itself.

"What excites me about Ramp Stack is that it helps streamline some of the more manual aspects of that work and creates additional capacity for us to focus even more on the strategic side of the Controller role."
— Dana McMillon, JColeman Consulting

Ramp Stack didn't just give her time back. It gave her back the conversations she became an accountant to have.

Speed of close is the quality of counsel

Johannes Sinnhuber became an accountant to help companies make better decisions. His clients at airCFO are VC-backed startups: companies running on monthly burn rates, making hiring decisions, pricing decisions, and fundraising calls based on where their numbers stand right now. They aren't waiting for a quarterly report. They need to know how last month went before this month goes any further.

For Johannes, that urgency changes what the close means. Every day a reconciliation sits unfinished is a day his client navigates without a clear financial picture. Every week between books and advice is a week of decisions made on incomplete information. For his clients to get a thought partner instead of a scorekeeper, the transactional work has to be behind him first.

"The sooner we're providing financial results, the quicker clients can make decisions with less delay. It means I can spend more time being a thought partner versus being reactive."
— Johannes Sinnhuber, airCFO

This is the version of the job he trained to do. The close isn't the destination. It's the thing that was in the way.

"We're going to be able to provide a lot more value from an advisory perspective. Think more about strategic advisory work versus reactive bookkeeping."
— Johannes Sinnhuber, airCFO

Other tools knock, but Ramp already lives in the books

Most products in this space still ask firms to connect third-party tools, import CSVs, and piece together access to the data accounting actually runs on. Ramp already has it. Spend, AP, and banking data for tens of thousands of businesses run natively on Ramp, which means Coworkers aren’t approximating context or waiting on a connector. They’re operating on the actual numbers. The difference between advice and execution is having the actual numbers, not a copy of them.

For accounting teams, that means no waiting on an import cycle or a connector refresh. When the close starts, the underlying data is already current. The work can be too.

And unlike closed products that do accounting for firms, Ramp Stack gives firms the architecture to build their own operation on top of it: Skills they compose, Coworkers that execute them, and routines that run on schedule without anyone having to remember to start them. A firm’s best processes stop being tribal knowledge and become ownable IP. A competitor who signed up yesterday can’t replicate what took months to build.

The firms that wait won't recognize the ones that didn't

The accounting firms that define the next decade won't be the biggest. They'll be the ones that built the deepest Stack: where the close runs itself, where institutional knowledge doesn't walk out when someone leaves, where every new client onboards into a proven system instead of one person's muscle memory.

Tyler is already thinking differently about who he hires and what he asks of them.

"This tool has finally automated what we all knew was coming with AI, done it in a reliable and consistent manner. Now it has me looking at how I hire and what my team does to become more of that partner to my clients."
— Tyler Otto, Specialized Accounting

John Ikosipentarhos has spent his career at Zeroed-In Consulting believing accountants are trained for something more than the work that fills most of their weeks. He sees the moment clearly:

"Stop doing the grunt work. Accountants have been doing the grunt work for a really long time. Now we have the opportunity to provide real value — we might get our time to shine."
— John Ikosipentarhos, Zeroed-In Consulting

That firm is being built now. At Specialized Accounting. At airCFO. At JColeman Consulting. At Zeroed-In Consulting. It's going to be built at every firm ready to get started.

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