Comparison
QuickBooks + Claude vs. Rillet vs. Campfire: when it's time to upgrade
Every startup finance stack hits the same question eventually: do we keep QuickBooks, or move to a real ERP? A few years ago the upgrade meant NetSuite. Today two newer, AI-native ERPs come up in almost every conversation we have with founders: Rillet and Campfire.
This is how we think about the decision for companies from Seed through Series B. We don’t resell or take referral fees from either vendor.
Short version: most startups through Series B don’t need a new ERP yet. They need the tools they already have connected and reviewed every month. When the signals below show up, Rillet and Campfire are both serious options.
When QuickBooks + Claude is enough
For a single US entity with straightforward billing, QuickBooks Online is a capable general ledger. What usually breaks isn’t QuickBooks. It’s everything around it: bank feeds nobody reconciles, payroll that doesn’t tie, revenue that lives in Stripe but never matches the books.
Connecting QuickBooks, the bank, cards, billing and payroll to Claude closes most of that gap. Claude does the matching, categorization and first drafts; a person reviews and approves. In a real September close for a B2B subscription company, that took about an hour and a half of working time.
You’re probably fine staying put if:
- You have one legal entity, in one currency
- Revenue is subscription or invoice-based without heavy contract terms
- No audit is coming in the next 12 months
- One or two people touch the books
The signals that you’ve outgrown it
We recommend starting an ERP evaluation when two or more of these are true:
| Signal | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| A second legal entity, or a foreign subsidiary | Consolidation and intercompany in QuickBooks becomes a spreadsheet exercise |
| Revenue in more than one currency | Revaluation and reporting get manual and error-prone |
| Usage-based, multi-element or long-term contracts | ASC 606 schedules outgrow spreadsheets quickly |
| A first audit or a raise with heavy diligence ahead | Auditors want permissions, approvals and a clean audit trail |
| The close still takes more than ten days, even with automation | The ledger itself has become the bottleneck |
| A finance team of three or more | Roles, approvals and review workflows start to matter |
One signal on its own rarely justifies a migration. A Series A company with one entity and a messy close usually needs cleanup, not new software.
How Rillet and Campfire position themselves
Both call themselves an “AI-native ERP,” and both are pitched as replacements for older systems like NetSuite. Here is what each says publicly, as of October 2026.
| Rillet | Campfire | |
|---|---|---|
| How it describes itself | “The AI-Native ERP”; headline promise of a “Zero-Day Close” | “The AI-Native ERP”; promises to “close 3 to 10 days faster” |
| Revenue recognition | Built for sales-led, product-led and usage-based models; ASC 606 analysis from contracts | “Revenue recognition for any billing model” |
| Entities and currencies | Multi-entity and consolidation | “180+ currencies. Unlimited entities.” |
| Close tools | Close management; continuous monitoring that flags exceptions and proposes accruals | Close checklists, flux analysis and account reconciliation |
| AI assistant | Aura, including a connector to outside tools such as Claude | Ember, a natural-language accounting assistant |
| Integrations shown | Stripe, Salesforce, HubSpot, Ramp, Brex, Bill, Gusto, Rippling, ADP and major banks, among others | “100+ natively built integrations” |
| Scale and funding | More than 600 customers and a $100M Series C at a $1B valuation (August 2026) | $35M Series A and $65M Series B in 2025; early traction came from companies of 100+ employees leaving NetSuite |
| Pricing | Not listed on the homepage | Not listed on the homepage |
Nothing in this table is a verdict. Both products are moving quickly, and the right choice depends on your revenue model, your auditor and the people who will run it day to day.
How we’d approach the choice
Start from your hardest problem, not the feature list. If revenue recognition is what breaks your close, weight that most heavily. If it’s a growing number of entities and currencies, weight that.
Time the move. The cleanest switch is at the start of a fiscal year or quarter, after a clean close in the old system, and well before an audit. Migrating mid-audit is the most expensive version.
Clean up first. Moving messy books into a new ERP gives you a more expensive mess. Reconcile, fix the chart of accounts and tie revenue before you migrate.
Keep the review layer. A new ERP automates a lot, but someone still has to decide what the numbers mean, approve what posts and answer the board’s questions. That part doesn’t change with the software.
Where we fit
For most of our clients, the answer today is to stay on QuickBooks, connect it properly, and revisit the question when the signals above appear. When a client does outgrow it, we run the evaluation and the migration, and keep running the close on the other side.
If you’re weighing this decision now, book a 30-minute intro.
Sources, checked October 2026: rillet.com, campfire.ai, Rillet’s Series C (FinTech Global), Campfire’s Series A (TechCrunch), Campfire’s Series B (FinTech Global). Product details are as each company describes them, not independently tested.
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