2026 Core Accounting Software Market Map

I have a treasure map for Mostly Metrics readers. It leads to riches you’ve already earned but haven’t collected.

Unfortunately, the quest involves your billing process. Plz keep reading.

Every day between delivering services and sending an invoice is another day you’re financing your customer’s business. Very generous of you.

And when pricing involves usage, tokens, credits, commitments, and whatever custom terms sales agreed to, getting an invoice out becomes its own booby trapped expedition.

Tabs turns contracts and usage into accurate invoices automatically, so your team can invoice from the terms you sold and the usage your customers generated (without rebuilding the calculation manually each month).

Want to know how much cash is stuck between “we delivered it” and “we billed it”?

The Tabs Billing Lag Calculator puts a number on it.

Stop providing your customers interest-free loans. 

Our annual report on AI in finance is about to drop.

We cover 12 layers of the financial tech stack, from ERPs to FP&A to Tax to AP.

If you want a copy of the report before the release date, sign up below. It’s free. It’s comprehensive. And it also like almost killed me to write lol. Holy market mapz.

At the center of all our finance and accounting workflows is the ERP… which I have to remind myself stands for Enterprise Resource Planning… and sounds like the most boring and strict thing of all time. It links finance, human resources, manufacturing, supply chain, sales, and procurement into one place, the name evoking less the feel of modern business software and more that of a 1970s Soviet Ministry for the Efficient Allocation of Tractor Parts (I also just finished watching Chernobyl on HBO so inefficient systems are top of mind).

What I've been grappling with this year is how much agentic capability belongs in the ERP when everything around it is closing in on agentic. The more autonomous the systems surrounding it get, the more locked down the ledger theoretically needs to be. Yung Joc once said “it’s going down” in the sub ledgers. BC that’s where data richness lives.

An agent with write access to the GL can change the history of the company.

At least if a subledger gets wiped, it's mirrored in the GL and you can rebuild. If the GL gets wiped, you're SOL.

Craig Sullivan, who's been at NetSuite for more than 25 years, thinks I'm guarding the wrong door:

That's a great point. I've bulk uploaded lots of transactions before, and I never once thought, wait, don't actually write that in. That’s the whole point. I don’t want to write them in myself, lol. For Craig, the human moments should be things like paying a vendor and approving anything big enough to make a dent. Posting to the GL is not on his no fly list.

Letting agents run freely inside systems is a big jump. To get there we'll need to severely improve our role-based access guardrails.

Shower thought: if an agent doesn't have a cell phone, how does it 2FA?

In the analogue world, as you give more people cards and payment rights, you add controls somewhere else to balance it. Agents are the same. Legacy ERPs could barely hold enough controls for humans. Now what do we do?

Craig said the unsexy part is permissions hygiene. Roles get stale over time and nobody goes back to clean them up (guilty as charged). That was super annoying when it was just people. An agent will use all the access it's given.

To take a step back: why did you buy a midmarket ERP in the first place? A few reasons, including subledger automation, multi-entity reporting, and rules-based access and controls for audit and SOX. Rev rec and billing are handled by many companies outside of the ERP now, leaving controls as the main, remaining reason. Which, once again, agents are putting pressure on.

And we have to remember that the context and events that make agents so awesome live in the subledgers (employee, vendor, customer stuff). In many ways, the traditional ERP is a generalist and doesn't have that depth. So I think being deterministic in many aspects of your ERP is a choice, rather than a lag.

The AI ERP case today continues to develop, and in the current moment the pull is novelty and price and service. The new vendors help you implement faster, have better support in Slack, and are much cheaper than what you implemented five years ago.

Totally fair for an $8M company. Harder to justify for a $1B company with a nice audit trail on their current system. And if you're really cheap, just get Sage. My buddy in city not to be named, a CFO at a company not to be named, was sick of paying top shelf prices, but also didn't feel confident enough (yet) in the AI. He shrugged his shoulders and begrudgingly bought Sage for 70% of the price.

But also, you get what you f’in pay for Gregg with two G's.

Maybe that's why there's been so much money raised in the space. Because to run at this correctly you need to build every subledger at once, and deep enough within each component (billing, rev rec, inventory, etc) to own the context. That takes a whack of engineers.

And perchance that's why some companies, like Numeric, are rethinking the approach entirely. Could an AI ERP pull in enough context through a data lake to close the gap? I do think that's possible. If you don't like the way the game is played, take your ball and rebuild the ERP as a Financial Data Platform. Sounds very appealing to someone like myself, who is not a CPA by trade, and just wants to get the job done right, with no emotional ties to how accounting booked entries in the past.

Parker Gilbert, Numeric's CEO, starts from "the event." An event could be a sales booking, a lease, or a slop bowl expensed from Chipotle. From his perspective, you cannot merely bring flat financial data into the system; you have to bring the underlying event in, because every accounting record is a projection of some business event.

And because the event is saved, you can reprocess it. Say the auditors come back three months later and tell you the incremental borrowing rate on a lease needs to be 2% higher (womp womp). You change the processing, re-run the same lease through it, and look at the diff, instead of digging back through journal entries.

At the same time, the AI isn't doing the processing:

Parker thinks of the LLM as a user of the system, the primary accountant, rather than the system itself.

At the same time though, one of my guests on the podcast reminded me of something called job security. Jeff Cooper is the CFO of Guidewire, a multi billion dollar core system of record for major insurance companies. He explained to me that buyers of their technology, CIOs, are not just making a tech decision; they're making a career decision. CFOs are making that same career bet on their system of record. Even if an agentic ERP works, the downside of being wrong may outweigh the upside.

Outcome #1: Best-of-breed wins and agents get so specialized nobody thinks about subledgers.

Outcome #2: The AI ERPs raise enough to build their own context and sub-agents and subledgers and everything else you need to make this a complete vision.

Either way, I feel the moats have shifted. The moat is in the subledger data, because that's what powers the workflows agents run on.

Net net, I don't think anyone is wrong. I'm a fan of innovation. I just personally don't know what the ERP is anymore. Or where to put all these damn Soviet era tractor parts

In this report we cover new and existing players across the following layers of the tech stack:

My goal is to make you more educated buyers of technology. That required me to interview more than 30 people and individually research 145 companies across the 12 layers we cover

A big shout out to the following partners and thought leaders who made this report economically viable to spend months researching:

I should probably go get some sunlight now. After +120 days of working on this, my Lenovo skin tan is turning green. But in the meantime, sign up to get the report early! It’s dope.

Saying "no" gracefully is an art form.

As a recovering people pleaser, I've always struggled with the idea of letting people down. Which is kinda an impossible position to be in as a finance leader.

You can't fund everyone's ideas. And you definitely can't make everyone happy (including your in laws)

One of my favorite Q's to ask CFOs on Run the Numbers is how they push back on fellow biz leaders without discouraging them from coming back with the next idea.

(bc the last thing you want is for Finance to become the dept. where good ideas go to die)

Kevin Hettrich, CFO of QuantumScape, gave me an excellent answer

His philosophy is that saying no shouldn't be a judgment on the quality of someone's idea... It should be the outcome of a fair prioritization process.

We also covered capital allocation, product development, and what it means to be a CFO at a company building technology that didn't exist when it was founded.

Wishing you an ERP that doesn’t run on old tractor parts,

CJ