Campfire Review: AI-Native Accounting for Scaling Startups

Campfire is an accounting system for venture-backed companies that have outgrown QuickBooks. It combines a general ledger with multi-entity consolidation, revenue automation, close management and reporting, and an AI assistant called Ember that answers questions about the books. The company pitches it as an “AI-native ERP” and claims customers close three to ten days faster.

Campfire was founded in 2023 by John Glasgow and says it has raised $100 million in total: a $35 million Series A led by Accel, then a $65 million Series B co-led by Accel and Ribbit Capital in October 2025, with Foundation Capital and Y Combinator also taking part. Its public customer list includes Replit, PostHog, TwelveLabs and Klarity.

The short version: Campfire and Rillet are chasing the same customer, a fast-growing SaaS or AI company with a small finance team, and are more alike than different. Campfire is a financial accounting system rather than a full ERP: it has no inventory, manufacturing or warehouse module of its own, though it does connect to inventory systems.

Campfire at a Glance

What Campfire Does

Core accounting

The general ledger supports unlimited entities and consolidation, with more than 180 currencies. Automation covers transaction categorization, bank and vendor matching, reconciliation and duplicate detection, plus policy checks on spend.

Revenue automation

Campfire’s revenue module handles recognition across billing models: subscription, usage, milestone and transaction revenue, plus contract modifications, upsell and downsell, standalone selling price and deferred revenue by customer, contract or product. Campfire titles the page “ASC 606 compliant”. Milestone and project revenue is the notable one, because Rillet does not name it: a services or project-based business should ask both vendors about it directly.

Close management

Close checklists, flux analysis (explaining month-over-month changes) and account reconciliation are built in, rather than tracked in a separate close tool or spreadsheet.

Reporting and Ember

Dashboards update in real time and drill down to transactions. Ember, the AI assistant, answers questions about financial data in plain language, such as what drove a change in operating expenses, drafts journal entries and flags missing accruals. Behind it, Campfire says it has built a proprietary Large Accounting Model trained only on accounting data, which it describes as the first of its kind in the ERP category and claims is achieving 95% or better accuracy on tasks such as reconciliations and variance analysis. That is the company’s own figure, not a tested one.

Migration

Migration is Campfire’s sharpest published claim. It says a Migration Agent moves years of journal entries into the ledger in 15 minutes and reconciles every account against your old balance sheet, with a team of accountants handling the rest, and that most teams are live by their next close. Two details matter more than the speed. Campfire says every journal entry arrives at transaction-level detail rather than as a summarized opening balance, so prior periods stay queryable for auditors, and it hands over a workbook with live formulas comparing the old balance sheet against the new one so you can verify the migration yourself. It also builds a sandbox with your own data before you commit, and treats chart of accounts cleanup as part of the work rather than a change order.

All of this is Campfire’s account of its own process. Set against Rillet, which says its implementations run four to six weeks with its own CPAs doing the work, it is the clearest difference between the two: one asks you to check the result, the other takes the job off your desk.

Campfire Pricing

Campfire does not publish pricing. There is no pricing page on its site at all, no free plan and no self-serve trial: everything runs through a sales process with custom quotes. ERP Research places its sweet spot at companies with roughly $20 million to $300 million in annual recurring revenue, which gives some sense of the intended scale.

When comparing quotes against Rillet, NetSuite or Sage Intacct, ask for total first-year cost: license, implementation, migration, and whether revenue automation is priced separately.

Who Campfire Is For

• Venture-backed software and AI companies with subscription or usage-based revenue.
• Finance teams trying to shorten the close without hiring.
• Companies with several entities or currencies after international expansion.
• Teams that want reporting and flux analysis inside the ledger rather than in spreadsheets.

Limitations

Not a full ERP. Campfire has no inventory, manufacturing, warehouse or field-service module of its own. It does have an inventory integration category: it publishes connectors to Cin7 and DOSS that journalize purchases, sales and stock movement, and the cost of goods sold behind them, into the ledger. A product business can therefore run Campfire as its accounting system with inventory handled elsewhere, but it is buying two systems, and manufacturers should still look at a full ERP.

No published pricing. Campfire has no pricing page, so budgeting requires a sales conversation from the start.

Small ecosystem. Campfire is young. Fewer accountants, auditors and consultants have worked in it than in NetSuite or Sage Intacct, so check who will support you and whether your auditors are comfortable with it. Campfire states that it is SOC 1 and SOC 2 certified, but does not say which report type, and it publishes no security page, so ask for the reports.

Customer claims are the vendor’s. The close-time and savings figures on Campfire’s website come from its own case studies. They are useful as direction, not as a benchmark you should expect.

How Campfire Compares

• Rillet: the closest competitor, with the same target customer and a similar AI-native pitch. Compare them head to head on revenue recognition for your specific billing model.
• NetSuite: broader modules and a far larger partner network, but slower to implement and heavier to run.
• Sage Intacct: mature multi-entity accounting and dimensional reporting, well known to CPAs.
• Digits and Puzzle: AI-native ledgers for smaller companies still replacing QuickBooks, with published self-serve pricing.

Frequently Asked Questions