TrainerRoad · 2025–Present
TrainerRoad Accounting Hub
Live financial intelligence for TrainerRoad. Pulls directly from the QuickBooks Online API to give the team real-time projections, P&L analysis, outlier detection, and growth scenarios. Killed the static quarterly forecast spreadsheet and replaced it with a model that's always current.
Challenge
Finance at TrainerRoad ran on stale data. We were spending tens of thousands a year on a third-party forecasting tool that nobody on the team ever fully got up to speed on. The backup forecast lived in a spreadsheet that was always a quarter behind reality. QuickBooks data was hard to analyze without pulling it out into Excel. Apple revenue required deriving merchant fees from two separate reports plus spreadsheet wizardry to land a journal entry. Sales tax remittance varied by state (monthly, quarterly, annually) and a different team handled payments, so reconciliation at month end was tedious. The team was buried in mechanical work, and the numbers we were making decisions on weren't current.
Approach
I built it around one core insight: finance should be working from data that reflects today, not last quarter. The hub pulls live from the QuickBooks Online API and the team's actual MRR growth rate. Finance Projections lets you change the growth rate, annual raises, or hiring plan and see what the P&L does over 1, 3, and 5 years. QuickBooks Analysis feeds our P&L and every transaction into a dashboard that tracks spend over time, flags outliers, and surfaces likely misclassifications. Apple Journal Entry Reconciliation derives merchant fees automatically and pushes the journal entry straight to QBO. Sales Tax Tracker creates a QuickBooks expense the moment a payment is made, so reconciliation pairs immediately at month end.
Impact
Forecasting used to be a quarterly project. Now it's live. The team changes the growth rate or hiring plan and sees the P&L over 1, 3, and 5 years immediately. Outlier detection catches misclassifications before they hit the books. Hours of monthly spreadsheet work got replaced with uploads and dashboards. The accounting team spends time on analysis instead of data entry.
Reflection
The best internal tools eliminate the work nobody wanted to do in the first place. Nobody misses the spreadsheets. And once the team had live data instead of last quarter's snapshot, decisions started getting made on what was actually happening, not what already happened.