Before diving in, we wanted to take a moment to wish you and your family well during these challenging times. This has certainly been an atypical Summer by any measure, and we hope you’ve stayed safe and healthy throughout. To whatever extent possible, we also hope you’ve had an opportunity to enjoy the (socially-distanced) great outdoors, whether on a bike ride, a mountain hike, or a campfire under the stars. Best wishes to you — Team Digits
It’s been a busy summer at Digits, as we’ve been simultaneously laying the foundations for our next major launch as well as rolling out improvements to Digits based on customer feedback!
While the business climate continues to be challenging, we’ve been working hard to further scale our Early Access program and get more companies off our waitlist. We believe that every business owner deserves to have the real-timevisibility, and powerful, actionableintelligence they need to overcome the current market dynamics, and we’re racing as quickly as we can to build out these functionality.
Power Users
This month, we focused on a slew of power-user features: we added multi-dimensional sorting and filtering capabilities to our expense Categories breakdown, we added a new Vendors section that provides an unprecedented (fully automated) analysis of your spend by vendor, and we simplified our dashboard navigation to make it even easier to deep-dive into your company’s finances.
Closed Books
We’ve also added support for closed periods, to let you see at-a-glance where your business’s financials are finalized, and where they may still be in flux. Whether you or your accountant prefers to set the closed date within your ledger (e.g. QuickBooks), or directly on Digits (just click the Settings icon), it’s seamless: all closed periods now display as locked in Digits, and your data is guaranteed to match your accounting software exactly. For current/unclosed periods, Digits applies its category classification and auto-reconciliation algorithms, so you have a real-time preview of what the month or quarter will look like, as it happens!
A Touch of Darkness
Our design team has been burning the midnight oil all Summer long, and that might have given them some ideas 😉 The Digits login screen now has a fresh coat of (dark) paint, and we were so pleased by the look that we’ve brought it to all of our signup and onboarding screens as well.
But the Best is Yet to Come…
Much of our work from this Summer remains under wraps 🙂 We’re incredibly excited to share what’s behind the curtain once it’s ready. Stay tuned for our next major announcement this Fall!
Full Summer Upgrade
Digits Core
Implemented system-wide support for closed and open periods.
Deployed automatic data validation for all closed periods.
Optimized vendor identification algorithms.
Preliminary architecture and support for manual data classification.
Digits for Expenses
Refreshed Categories view, including sorting and filtering.
New and improved Vendors view.
Implemented transaction filters.
Enhanced dashboard navigation.
Improved frontend UI performance for large datasets.
As businesses around the country and around the globe continue to struggle during these unprecedented times, we’ve been working as quickly as possible to scale our technical infrastructure and our Early Access program to keep pace with demand and help those in need.
At Digits, our mission is to provide the real-time visibility, and powerful, actionable intelligence, that business owners require to chart their course in this dynamic environment, and we feel the obligation to do as much as we can to help.
This month, we’ve been focused on two major, parallel tracks: an intense effort to drive the scalability and accuracy of our core financial engine in order to accelerate how quickly we make it through our customer waitlist, and a return to green-field product development as we lay the groundwork for our next major launch, later this year.
This month’s Upgrade is a BIG one. However, much is still under wraps, so stay tuned for more!
June Upgrade
Digits Core
Ability to enable or disable integration sub-accounts.
Improved automatic validation of transaction reconciliation.
Enhanced category classification with additional ledger data.
Automated regression detection for classification algorithms.
Automated health indicators for ledger data synchronization.
Major scalability improvements to our data processing pipelines.
Major query performance improvements to support high transaction volume customers.
After two years of heavy development, we’ve announced Digits for Expenses! We couldn’t be more humbled by the support and excitement we’ve seen from countless business owners and accountants across the country and around the globe, and we’re working tirelessly to get them into our Early Access program.
Since our launch, we’ve also been solidifying Digits’ underlying financial engine. Businesses come in all shapes and sizes, so we need to be absolutely certain that Digits supports them all.
This month, our biggest upgrades focused on new technology to help ensure that our understanding and your understanding of your business’ financials are the same.
Automated P&L and Balance Sheet Validation
Data quality is at the heart of our mission to provide real-time visibility and actionable insights into how your business is spending money, and we’re constantly iterating on approaches to guarantee both precision and accuracy, while keeping your data private and secure.
Over the past month, we’ve built fully-automated validation using two of the three most common financial reports. Here’s how it works:
We first generate a full Profit & Loss Statement and a Balance Sheet report using Digits’ internal, proprietary representation of your company’s financials. We then export the same P&L and Balance Sheet from your ledger’s API, for each month of your company’s history. Our validation pipeline then automatically compares them—line by line—guaranteeing that Digits’ representation of your data is accurate and that you can trust the numbers we display.
Automated Regression Detection
While validation is critical for all historical data, it’s meaningless for real-time transactions that have not yet hit your ledger. That’s where Digits’ online classification engine comes in.
We are constantly iterating and improving our algorithms to give you even better real-time insights into spend (with correct categorization and vendor identification), and it’s critical that those improvements don’t unintentionally regress other data points.
Over the past month, we’ve architected and implemented an automated classification regression monitor, which continuously watches a large and growing set of known-correct transactions from our sample data, and then automatically alerts on any unexpected changes.
This is just the start, and we continue to invest heavily in data validation, and data quality assurance.
There’s lots more we’ve been working on, though…
May Upgrade
Digits for Expenses
Improved time-series navigation with “Jump to today” feature.
Improved support for yearly period views.
Stabilized transaction deep-link URLs.
Polished commenting UX.
Enhanced activity feed with additional event types.
New UI for identifying unknown/novel transactions.
Digits Core
Automated P&L and Balance Sheet validation.
Automated regression detection.
Improved anomalous transaction detection.
Improved vendor identification for journal entry line items.
Productionized automatic vendor deduplication.
Implemented depreciation and amortization exclusions for expense analysis.
Improved auto-reconciliation of source transactions across larger time windows.
Productionized new recurrence detection algorithm.
Integrations
Improved status monitoring of 3rd-party data providers.
Tuned importer pipeline for performance and scale.
Deployed API upgrades to improve imported data consistency.
Improved handling of popular expense management software transactions.
We are obsessed with the vision that business finance should be immediately accessible and intuitive. It should learn, in real-time, as the business evolves, and it should empower business owners and operators everywhere, without requiring any prior financial training.
Why? Because today’s business climate requires you to take action in the moment and react rapidly to changing market conditions. That means not waiting weeks to receive a standard packet of black & white financials—which honestly can be quite difficult to interpret—and instead demanding the visibility and insight you need to make decisions, right now.
The Power of Digits
The world’s largest companies have sophisticated finance teams and internal forecasting models that give them these capabilities. What about everyone else? What if synthesized, actionable financial insights were available to every business on earth? What if they were always in real-time, and always up-to-date?
For two years, we’ve been building the technical infrastructure to make this a reality: N-dimensional transaction attribution. Auto-reconciliation. Predictive classification. Vendor identification and profile synthesis. Sub-second, full-ledger search. Statistical analysis and anomaly detection. Per-secret envelope encryption. The list goes on.
Introducing Digits, for Expenses
We’ve been humbled by the glowing feedback from our early customers and we’ve been inundated with requests for access. And, in these unprecedented times, we feel the obligation to help as many business owners as we can, as quickly as possible.
So today, we’re launching a broad early-access program for Digits for Expenses. We’ve taken all of the power of our platform and focused it specifically on helping business owners navigate today’s challenging market dynamics, so they can see and manage how their company is spending money:
*Digits is a phenomenal and truly game-changing product. To be able to ask such a wide spectrum of financial questions and get to those answers immediately has been so empowering, and the team’s passion for the space is clear in all the small details.*
Thinking back to a finance world before Digits…feels like remembering Netflix as a DVD-by-mail service.
– Kenny Mendes, **Head of Finance, People, and Operations**
Digits for Expenses is the first real-time, intuitively visual, machine-learned expense monitoring dashboard for small businesses, and in light of current conditions, we are making it Free.
(Seriously. We have other paid products on our roadmap, but Digits for Expenses is and will continue to be free for all small businesses. In this quarantine, it’s the least we can do.)
GV leads $22M Series B
As we’ve built Digits, we’ve been overwhelmed by the energy and excitement for our mission from founders, accountants, and investors alike, and we’ve been honored to have the financial backing of Benchmark and over 70 passionate angel investors.
We see this as a long-term, sustained effort, and Digits for Expenses is just the first chapter: we believe that innovations in technology, algorithms, and design have unlocked a new realm of possibility for financial software, and we are committed to making this vision a reality for businesses around the world.
In support of this, we’re excited to share that we have closed $22M in Series B funding, led by Jessica Verrilli at GV, and we’re thrilled to welcome her to our Board. Jessica’s deep experience in corporate development at Twitter and in early-stage investing through GV and #Angels have given her unique insight into the challenges small businesses face during their most-defining moments, and we’re looking forward to imbuing the product with her knowledge.
*Jeff and Wayne are masterful at creating intuitive, high-utility products from complicated data. I saw this up close with Crashlytics and Twitter, and I’m thrilled to partner with them on Digits as they reimagine financial software for startups.*
– Jessica Verrilli, **General Partner**
This round gives us the stability we need to become the partner that businesses can trust: at current burn, Digits’ runway now extends over 10 years.
$8+ Billion and counting…
When we announced our Series A in November, Digits’ production systems saw over $1.5 Billion in transaction value across our early customer base. Today, that number is already over $8 Billion, and growing daily.
Digits for Expenses is available today, for free, for US-based startups and small businesses. We plan to add support for international markets later this year.
Digits takes just a few clicks to set up, and sits on top of your existing ledger and your existing accountant’s work—you change nothing. Sign up here to get started.
(If you’re an investor, startup incubator, or accounting firm and want priority access for your portfolio companies, contact us at partnerships@digits.com.)
With Thanks,
As founders, we would like to thank the entire Digits team for their tireless work over the past two years to bring us to this point. We still see this as just the beginning of our Digits journey, and we look forward to building powerful tools to help businesses of every shape and size chart their course.
We can’t wait for you to experience Digits, and we can’t wait to hear what you think.
To be sure, working remotely is not for every business, and not for every individual.
If your team needs to huddle together to prototype a physical product, that will be tricky. Or if you work for a biotech startup with special lab equipment, it’s likely infeasible to provision it for every home-office. Or if you’re a big-time extrovert who lives for lunchroom gossip and 5pm team socials, this work-style may not be your cup of tea.
But remarkably, we’re now at the point where most software/digital/service-based businesses, and most knowledge-based employees, are well-suited to going fully-remote, and many will be better off if they do! In fact, remote work has already jumped 159% in the past 12 years, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Wayne and I founded Digits 2 years ago to create the next generation of delightful, powerful business finance software, and we had a choice: how should we structure the business? When we landed on building a fully-remote startup, even some of our closest supporters were skeptical.
Can a fully-distributed team be productive?
Won’t everyone just slack off all day?
How do you brainstorm and make product decisions?
But, but… whiteboarding??
We immediately faced these and countless other questions, but we were convinced that we could not build the scale of business we envisioned in San Francisco, and we had a strong distaste for the known challenges of distributed offices.
With the full benefit of hindsight, we could not be happier with our decision. Working as a fully-remote team has been a joy, and we have relentlessly iterated on the tools and techniques we’ve used to make it so.
Here’s just a few of the lessons we’ve learned over the past 2 years building a fully-remote company:
The Key Difference: No HQ
“Remote” isn’t new, and isn’t great. “Fully-remote” is a totally different concept.
Most peoples’ understanding of remote work has been a scattering of remote employees and a big HQ somewhere. As a result, the remote teams miss out on a lot of the ad hoc conversation/culture that develops in the colocated offices, are frequently left out of some meetings (sorry, who forgot to dial-in?), and inevitably begin to feel like 2nd-class citizens.
Trust me, I’ve been there.
A fully-remote team, by contrast, means no conversations are happening in an office somewhere to miss out on. At Digits, the pulse and culture of the company is pushed online for everyone to partake in: what would normally be hallway conversations now happen in some digital form. Chats are quickly upgraded to voice/video calls when written communication is not enough—and there is no stigma towards, or friction preventing, those who were passively following along in the chat room now asking to join live. Everyone is on the same level playing field.
This makes our fully-remote team feel like we aren’t remote at all. We’re all working right next to each other, at adjacent desks, despite being thousands of miles apart. Our remote interactions are a real and meaningful replacement for stopping by a coworker’s desk to chat something out or chasing them down in the hallway.
The moment any part of your team is physically together in an office, all of these critical distinctions begin to break down.
The Buddy System
We aim to run all projects at Digits in micro-teams of 2-3 people. Sometimes 4, but in practice we’ve found they tend to immediately split themselves into pairwise sub-teams.
The major benefit is you always have a buddy. From the moment we kick off the week, you know what your goals are and who you’ll be working with to achieve them, so you can dive right in together.
On the engineering side, this means you always have a designated code-review partner to keep things moving. It varies, but over the last 2 years many of our teams organically started to pair-program (yes, fully remotely) to further align and accelerate their work.
On the business and product sides, it’s the same story. We pair on strategy docs, product wireframes, marketing copy, blog post drafts—you get the idea. And pairing makes the work way more fun! You’re not sitting in your house toiling alone; you’re talking with at least one other colleague constantly, and you’re both working together to achieve a common goal.
It’s easy to think we’re wasting time having at least 2 people tackle every task, but the opposite is true: quality is much higher, each project moves at a faster pace, and in a distributed world, redundancy is critical to increasing the odds that someone knowledgeable about a thing is online and available.
The benefits have been dramatic: nobody is lost in their own world either slacking off or making unilateral (mediocre) decisions. Ideas are iterated and improved rapidly as they are discussed in small groups and then raised for broader awareness. And there is no unwanted overhead or design-by-committee: each micro-team is empowered with their own goals for the week, so they know the direction to head in and are trusted to seek input when and where they need it. If they haven’t, it will become very obvious at our next group check-in 🙂
The Death of 30-Minute Time Slots
To stay in sync and highly aligned as a remote team, we do (short) all-hands meetings every 48 hours. Apart from that, we aim to have no other scheduled meetings.
Of course, interviews do need to be booked, and external customer/partner meetings get scheduled, but the principle holds: work within one’s micro-team is fluid and synchronous—you’re constantly on and off ad hoc video calls or pairing sessions with your buddy, but work between teams is async: via Google docs to review, large PRs that need broader buy-in, blog drafts that need editing, etc.
Digits is fully remote, has no office, and owns no conference rooms. This fact is critical.
Without conference rooms, there are no scarce resources to book, which means meetings don’t need to be planned in advance, which means they don’t need to be 30 minutes or an hour long. Chats can happen when the necessary people are available (which in practice is typically within minutes, because teams are small and independent, and no one else is over-scheduled either). You can add people to meetings when they are needed, and they drop off if the topic moves on. There is none of the awkwardness, friction, or wasted time of traveling between, waiting outside of, entering, or leaving, physical conference rooms. It’s truly remarkable.
This has made our typical internal “meeting” last on the order of 5-7 minutes: you hop on, get your questions answered or share your perspective, and return to execution. With the elimination of Parkinson’s Law, the Maker’s Schedule is complete: meetings usually aren’t long enough to knock you out of flow.
This flips the typical work day on its head: rather than running between recurring meetings and trying to “get stuff done” in between, we’re all free to focus on executing until pinged by someone who needs input. And since those interrupts are typically quite short, they aren’t disruptive—you’re right back at it without forgetting where you left off.
All of this creates an interesting reality: we’ve felt that we’ve reliably had more face-to-face interactions with colleagues than we ever did in physical settings. Everyone is more available. There is less friction to chatting—you don’t need to walk across the building to catch someone at their desk. And because the interactions are shorter, they tend to be much more frequent: I’d much rather chat with my teammates for a few minutes every day than a half hour once a week in a standing meeting!
The Remote Work Toolkit
Productivity tools often border on religious choices for many people and organizations, so I hesitate to make specific recommendations.
Instead, it’s more important to focus on the “jobs to be done”—what use case is each tool meant to solve—and then standardize on an answer for each, so everyone on the team knows where to go.
Over the past 2 years, we’ve converged on the following core roles for our tools:
Asynchronous & semi-synchronous lightweight chat (no important decisions, no expectation of reading scrollback)
Synchronous 1-1 (or small group) video/audio chats
Pair programming
Whiteboarding
Work-tracking/project management
We have preferred to find specific tools that really excel at each of these distinct use-cases (even if we only use a tiny fraction of the tool’s functionality), rather than consolidating on fewer tools that might be less ideal. In practice, we’ve not had much issue forgetting where something is because the use cases are sufficiently distinct and obvious.
We also constantly evaluate and explore new tools, as the pace of innovation in remote collaboration is currently exploding.
For those who insist on asking, our current toolchain at Digits is:
…but it can and will change as new options come on the scene 🙂
We do not use email for anything other than customer support, and I can hand-count the total number of internal emails we’ve sent since starting the company.
A New Set of Employee Benefits
As founders, Wayne and I care deeply about showing company personality through employee benefits. Above and beyond health insurance and 401ks, we try to embrace the remote-work lifestyle to ensure every team member’s day-to-day is as delightful as possible.
Wherever You Work Best
Not everyone “works remotely” the same way. Some people have a home office they have used for years, but that’s really not typical. Usually it’s a difficult choice—do I take over a spare bedroom or underutilized corner of my house or apartment, or do I find a co-working space nearby? Countless factors go into this decision and it would be unfair for us to motivate one over the other.
So we happily support both!
Every new Digits employee gets the choice: if you’d rather work from home, we give you a $2,000 budget to outfit your home office. A great chair. A new desk. Houseplants! A side-table with a coffee bar. Really anything you feel would make your day-to-day more enjoyable. Conversely, if you’d rather go the co-working route, awesome. Pick your favorite spot and we’ll cover your monthly membership fee for a desk.
The Need for Speed
Regardless of which direction you go, we have another perk up our sleeves. We’ve found that everyone works from home sometimes, for many reasons, even if they prefer a coworking environment. And ISP quality varies widely across the country.
Starting last year, we rolled out a new benefit: Digits pays for every employee’s home Internet service, and we immediately upgrade it to Gigabit (or the equivalent fastest available plan)!
Never have you seen a more butter-smooth video-chat experience from so many different homes across the country…
The New Power of Team Travel
Gone are the days of traveling between distributed offices for alignment sessions or making the monthly trek to HQ.
There’s no office at all, so there is nowhere you have to go just to make an appearance or get face-time! Instead, all internal business travel can be deeply intentional, and optimized for creating amazing shared experiences.
At our current stage, we’ve found the ideal cadence is quarterly. 3 times per year, we host our Digits Onsites: we rent a series of AirBnbs (or hotels, as we’ve scaled) and we bring the entire team together somewhere in the country for a jam-packed week of strategic planning, knowledge sharing, in-person work and collaboration, and fun team-building activities and celebratory dinners. During the 4th quarter, we throw our annual holiday party.
And what we’ve learned is that working remotely makes these in-person moments together even more memorable. Time is punctuated by Onsites. Product milestones are marked by the strategy we discussed at each one. Team members’ start dates are recalled by which Onsite they first joined.
There’s always the next one on the calendar to look forward to, and we go to great lengths to make each one special, in some way or another. With no corporate budget dedicated to facilities or inter-office travel (indeed, one month last year our cash burn was 91% payroll-related!), we instead shift those resources to Onsite logistics, with great effect.
The resulting work-life balance has been magical: we are home with our families, with no commute to speak of, day-in and day-out, with flexible schedules and an unlimited vacation policy, and then we’re all together each quarter, exploring someplace new and aligning on our next chapter.
The Future of Work
Without question, we will be forever adapting and refining our approaches to remote work with each new level of scale and degree of business complexity, but we foresee no structural reasons that would cause us to change this basic approach. Indeed, great companies such as GitLab, Invision, Buffer, and many others have pioneered this path with well-recognized success.
At Digits, we’re extremely energized by the growing interest in remote work and the explosion of new tools that are being built to facilitate it, and we’re excited to join the community in sharing and iterating best practices.
These past 2 years have honestly surpassed our wildest expectations: one of our teammates recently expressed that they don’t see themselves returning to an office environment for the rest of their career.
Everyone else nodded in agreement.
If you’re excited to join a passionate, fun-loving, fully-remote team that’s obsessed with building delightful business finance software, we’d love to meet you! See our open positions here.
