Tool providing feedback on the completion of financial reports
Puzzle provides companies three financial statements that answer three different questions:
One fundamental process to reaching complete and accurate financial statements is by categorizing money in and money out transactions. The Puzzle system does a lot of auto-categorizing through machine learning and user-configured rules, and users were lacking a fast way to see whether their categorization was complete on a monthly basis.
There are many nuances that go into accounting. However, categorizing, finalizing, and reconciling are the essential monthly tasks needed to reach complete and accurate financials on Puzzle. Users did not have a transparent way to understand what outstanding tasks are preventing them from reaching baseline financial statement completion.
Puzzle is where ambitious founders and CFOs maximize confidence in their biggest financial decisions. If users could have an identifiable status to verify that their financials - such as cash reports and startup metrics - were complete on a monthly basis, then they could maintain impeccable financial records month-over-month.These completion indicators, later renamed as dashboard report statuses, were anticipated to have the greatest impact on founders of early stage companies, as opposed to larger companies with built-out internal accounting teams.
The first iteration of this feature was a status indicator on each month that shows the completeness of transaction categorization and finalization. Categorization helps catalog transactions to a company's chart of accounts. Finalization refers to whether a human reviewed and approved a transaction categorized by another user, a user-configured rule, or the system’s AI.
While categorizing is a vital step to getting complete and accurate financials, reconciling bank and credit card accounts also contribute to complete and accurate financial statements. Reconciliations help identify accounting and bank errors by providing explanations of the differences between the accounting record's cash balances and the bank balance position per the bank statement.Once the ability to reconcile an account was built on Puzzle, reconciliations were included in the status indicator so that a month can’t be marked complete until the reconciliations are complete. The main difficulty was designing this in a way that keeps the call to actions and doesn’t make that small popover too busy. I also wanted to create an MVP in a manner that repurposed what was previously built so that minimal engineering cost was required.
Success of this feature was measured on an enhanced user understanding of what builds financial reports. This feature was expected to improve levels of categorization, finalization, and reconciliation.
The first six months: Analytics of this feature started recording in August 2022, reports were captured February 2023.
The dashboard report status is consistently praised as a favorite feature by users and investors. Puzzle offers white-glove onboarding and follow ups, and the common feedback is that this status is highly valuable for new and recurring users.
