What building Debits taught me about firm workflows

I build software for accountants, and I also help run a firm. That second part is the unfair advantage. You can’t design your way to the right product from the outside; you have to feel the pain on a Tuesday afternoon in March when a client still hasn’t sent the thing you needed last week.

The work is mostly waiting

The first thing operating a firm teaches you is that a huge share of the job isn’t accounting at all — it’s coordination. Waiting on documents. Waiting on answers. Reminding, following up, re-explaining. Any tool that only makes the accounting faster, while ignoring the coordination, barely moves the needle. The bottleneck was never the math.

The client is the quiet judge

The second lesson: the client experience decides everything. A firm can love a tool internally, but if it’s confusing for the business owner on the other side, it fails. People judge your whole practice by the worst login you ever sent them. So I design for the client first now — clear, calm, no jargon — and let that constraint shape the firm-facing side.

People judge your whole firm by the worst login you ever sent them.

Trust is the product

The third lesson is about trust. In most software, a bug is an annoyance. In accounting software, a wrong number is a breach of the entire relationship. Building here means precision and clarity aren’t nice-to-haves — they’re the product. It changes how you ship, how you test, and how you talk to customers.

Every one of these lessons came from running a real practice, and every one of them is baked into the way Debits works. The firm makes the software honest.