Light Manifesto

Built for a different economy

Initially designed to be all-encompassing business process suites, ERP systems were created primarily to serve the secondary sector of the economy — production — as industrial output grew rapidly from World War II until the great financial crises.

The ERP category, enterprise-resource planning, was designed to run end-to-end process planning from input to output. An automobile manufacturer needed one place to manage everything from sourcing raw materials and staffing each shift to the final sale of the car.

However, as the global economy evolved, so did the needs of businesses — particularly in the rapidly growing service sector. Since the 2000s, the tertiary sector has grown by an order of magnitude compared to the production sector. Yet modern, successful service companies are still forced to use a legacy ERP the moment they need to run their financial operations in more than one country.

The hollowing out of the ERP

As the cloud and internet grew, the ERP category was first disrupted by Salesforce, which carved out the CRM function. Later came a series of products that carved out the HRM (led by Workday) and all the employee-related functions, leaving the ERP as a hollow husk. The fundamental reason: a tight coupling between your sales and your material input is not needed for services companies. Tech companies scale their operations with cloud providers, while consulting firms primarily need to manage their people and equipment. These functions are better served by specialized systems rather than traditional ERPs.

To remediate the 'husk' problem, countless financial point solutions have been created for the tertiary sector — Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, FP&A, Procurement, Expense Management, and the list goes on. Billions of dollars have been spent building, installing, and servicing products that patch over the underlying problem: the financial platforms of businesses are based on the husk of an outdated category. And the problem is particularly acute for the tertiary sector, which gets no benefit from inventory, production planning, and supply chain capabilities.

Enter the Smart Financial Platform

The time is overdue for a better category to manage financials at modern companies. The Smart Financial Platform (SFP) is a product category dedicated to deeply solving the accounting, bookkeeping, reporting, and associated financial flows of businesses in the tertiary sector. With an SFP, international expansion no longer requires a $250,000 budget and a 15-month implementation project. Instead, it offers an automated accounting system that can answer queries directly through platforms like Slack.

To pave the way, we have launched Light, an AI-native SFP that solves the financial needs of multinational businesses — and solves them well. Light offers automated multi-currency bookkeeping, real-time financial reporting, and AI-powered pre-accounting, all accessible through user-friendly interfaces and integrations with popular business tools. We focus on automated bookkeeping for multinationals, with great products for AR and AP and simple, performant APIs — built on beautiful design and AI. We perform the sale, installation, and support for our clients.

With Light, the finance team can be power-users and build automations, workflows, and configurations without being technical.