FP&A Software as Finance Coach
Andy Su, co-founder of Pry, on building the "Figma of finance"
This points to FP&A software becoming part product, part lightweight finance advisor. Pry sold into founders who often had no finance leader and were still running budgets in spreadsheets, so education was not a nice extra, it was part of making the product usable and sticky. If the tool also teaches a startup what good MRR, gross margin, and budgeting discipline look like, it can replace some of the work founders once got from a fractional CFO or an experienced operator.
-
Pry was built for seed to Series B startups, priced from free to low hundreds per month, with setup meant to be simple. That customer often needs help building a forecast from scratch, not just better software. Education closes the gap between having raw financial data and knowing how to use it to make hiring, spend, and fundraising decisions.
-
This is also a churn strategy. Pry said churn was normal for SMB software and that one way to reduce it was a library or university that explains how SaaS metrics should be calculated and what healthy ranges look like. The more a company learns its operating rhythm inside Pry, the harder it is to go back to a blank spreadsheet.
-
The contrast with adjacent players is clear. Pilot pairs software with human bookkeepers and fractional CFO style services, while Runway focuses on collaborative modeling software that helps teams understand how the business works. Pry sat in between, using software plus embedded guidance to turn an entry level FP&A tool into a coach for early stage operators.
The category has kept moving toward more opinionated finance software. As FP&A products add integrations, workflow, and AI generated explanations, the winners are likely to be the ones that do not just store a model, but actively teach teams how to run against it every week. That is how early stage finance software grows from a spreadsheet replacement into a system for operating the company.