Designing for multiple personas is hard.
Designing for multiple finance personas—each with their own pace, tools, and stakes—is even harder.

From day one at Stacks, we knew we weren’t building a one-size-fits-all tool. We were building a system of layered visibility, shared workflows, and just the right amount of automation.

The Principle: One System, Multiple Views

As Nielsen Norman Group notes, designing for multiple personas often means balancing competing needs: control vs. speed, depth vs. clarity, detail vs. overview.

At Stacks, we apply what we call the 80:10:10 rule:

• 80% of our design focus goes to accountants and preparers—the ones doing the work

• 10% to the controllers and reviewers, who need context and confidence

• 10% to CFOs and finance leaders, who need insights, not inputs

The challenge is to solve for all three in the same system.

1. The Workflow Is the Product

For preparers, context switching is a killer. That’s why we’ve designed Stacks to:

• Eliminate redundant clicks between ERPs, spreadsheets, and emails

• Reduce transaction-level gruntwork with AI-powered auto-matching

• Fetch supporting data inline when writing explanations

• Generate pre-filled journal entries with smart templates and AI assistance

“It’s like having a full-time assistant just for month-end.”
— Controller at a mid-market tech company

2. We Don’t Replace Tools. We Work With Them.

We didn’t build “the new spreadsheet.”
We built a system that talks to your existing one.

Stacks integrates deeply with:

• 📊 Excel (with Synced Sheets)

• 💬 Slack & Microsoft Teams (for reviews, nudges, summaries)

• 📬 Email (for delivery, not busywork)

We wrote more about this in a recent blog, but the principle holds:

If a tool already works for you, we enhance it, not replace it.

3. ERP-Agnostic, Workflow-First

Whether it’s NetSuite, Xero, SAP, or Intacct—Stacks sits above your ERP, orchestrating the workflows that often live between systems:

• Task routing

• Sign-off collection

• Audit-ready timelines

• Close analytics

• Exception handling

“Stacks let us move faster across NetSuite and Xero without changing either. That’s rare.”
— Director of Finance, global SaaS company

4. Smarter, Not Just Faster

This is where AI shines.

We’ve been steadily building along a clear maturity path, from basic automation to intelligent assistants to eventually autonomous operators.

Stacks uses LLMs to:

• Spot anomalies during flux reviews

• Draft explanations using historical and transaction-level context

• Route tasks based on dependency

• Recommend entries or reviewers based on past behavior

The goal? AI that acts like a teammate, not a chatbot.

5. For Controllers: Visibility + Velocity

Controllers don’t just need speed. They need trust in the process.

Stacks delivers:

• Real-time progress dashboards

• Risk-aware checklists

• Review management

• Exception tracking across entities and task types

“I used to chase people. Now I see blockers before they ask for help.”
— Controller, Fintech client

6. For CFOs: Insight, Delivered

CFOs don’t want to log into another dashboard.
So we bring the numbers to them, where they already are.

• 📥 Synced Sheets for real-time reporting

• 🔁 Flux analysis with thresholds and comments

• 📩 Daily summaries delivered to inboxes or #close-progress Slack channels

• ✅ Final sign-off paths with full visibility, no micromanagement

“I don’t ask for updates anymore. I get them.”
— CFO, SaaS company

Building the System That Works for Everyone

Designing for multiple personas means more than toggles and dashboards.
It means understanding who does the work, who reviews it, and who owns the outcome.

At Stacks, our goal is to make the process smarter for everyone involved, without asking anyone to work differently.

Let us know how we can do that better.