Planning layer over QuickBooks
Andy Su, co-founder of Pry, on building the "Figma of finance"
The core bet is that planning software can stretch the useful life of SMB accounting systems far beyond simple bookkeeping. QuickBooks is the ledger where transactions live, but many growing companies switch once budgeting, headcount planning, board reporting, and cross functional forecasting outgrow spreadsheets. Pry sat on top of QuickBooks and Xero to handle that planning layer, so a startup could keep its existing books system while getting workflows that normally pushed finance teams toward NetSuite, Anaplan, or Adaptive style tools.
-
This was not a QuickBooks replacement play. Pry explicitly avoided rebuilding accounting, and instead pulled data from QuickBooks and Xero, where the books stayed as the system of record. The upgrade was in planning, collaboration, and modeling, not in core ledger infrastructure.
-
The practical switching trigger was often Excel pain, not accounting pain. When finance teams were running budgets, hiring plans, and departmental forecasts in disconnected spreadsheets, the pain looked like broken formulas, version confusion, and slow reconciliation. Prys product aimed to remove that spreadsheet layer before a full ERP migration became necessary.
-
The comparison with NetSuite and Anaplan is really about contract shape and implementation burden. Pry sold with a low cost product led motion, while enterprise planning tools were built for larger deployments and heavier setup. QuickBooks itself has added budgeting and forecasting features, but those remain extensions of the accounting product rather than a dedicated collaborative FP&A layer.
This pattern keeps showing up across the startup finance stack. The winning products are likely to let companies keep familiar systems of record like QuickBooks in the background while replacing spreadsheets in the foreground. As APIs improve and planning tools connect to payroll, CRM, and warehouse data, more of the mid market jump to ERP gets postponed until companies hit true operational complexity.