Stamped AI: replacing the CPA in the year-end process for SMBs — Opta

Discover how Opta helps the Stamped AI team provide SMBs with fast, easy, and affordable financial and corporate tax preparation in today's fast-moving world of businesses.

Year-end anxiety for SMBs

Imagine it's October again, and as a small business owner, you are getting the usual end-of-year anxiety about many things. For most small businesses, the end of the year is usually a busy period for sales and putting your books in order.

On the other hand, this SMB owner's anxiety trickles down to the Certified Public Accountant you work with to put your business finances in order.

According to data from the CFO.com platform, it takes 25 days on the average to perform annual financial business closing.

Introducing Stamped AI

What if I told you that you could simplify these processes around financial and corporate tax preparation, and you do not have to wait for the last quarter of the year to start doing a business audit. Stamped AI is an accounting firm using technology to provide SMBs with fast, easy, and affordable financial and corporate tax preparation.

Stamped AI integrates with products you use every day, like Xero or QuickBooks, and all you need to do is connect your QuickBooks or Xero to it. Then, upload other necessary documents in a secure and encrypted platform and get financial statements and proper audits right away; you also get a dedicated account manager to whom you have direct one-on-one access. There is also a massive potential for automation that the team is trying to tap into.

The accounting world is way behind in terms of technology. CPAs are highly specialized individuals that often end up doing boring monotonous jobs. We aim to make accounting easy and fun for both business owners AND accountants.

— Senior Developer, Stamped AI.

The Infrastructure Needs

The innovative Stamped AI engineering team started by using DigitalOcean with hosted database, and it was enough for their needs at the time. However, it became tough when they began to expand and needed to migrate cloud infrastructure to AWS. Dominic Bilodeau, a senior developer at Stamped AI, said this was especially difficult as they had next to no expertise in Terraform at the time. They also wanted to ensure they were following the best standards, especially related to some certifications like SOC II, ISO, etc.

You can get your product or cloud solution to be SOC-2 Compliant in Record Time using Opta with ease.

According to the Chief Technology Officer Jean-François Cloutier, the small engineering team had a lot to deliver, so it had fewer resources to handle implementing cloud infrastructure best practices and had to manage it afterward. In addition, the team was dreading the day of the AWS migration, and he wanted a product that was both secure and compliant out-of-the-box.

Opta: a match made on the cloud.

Finding Opta started a new day for the Stamped AI, as it was what they needed and more!

Opta is a tool that abstracts all the complicated parts of terraform and aws. You can be confident that you have a secure aws architecture with minimal efforts and no need for a full-time dev-ops — Senior Developer, Stamped AI

Using Opta has been an excellent experience for the team; Jean-François Cloutier described it as a trusted friend that you can rely upon to get you a secured, well architecture, and compliant cloud environment.

Opta's stamp of excellence

The Stamped AI team started using Opta, and just with a couple of lines of code, hit Opta deploy, and you are set to go. One of the immediate benefits is excellent savings in company resources like engineering time and money which they would otherwise use to hire more DevOps engineers.

If you compare cloud infrastructure as code with Opta, we can say that Opta is like having a tesla with auto pilot, whereas standard approaches with terrraform or cloudformation is driving a manual transmission car with no AC.

The Stamped AI team did not have to hire a full-time DevOps expert. Thanks to Opta, they also did not have to spend hours learning Terraform in detail. Another great thing is hand-offs, there was a change in the engineering team at Stamped AI, but with Opta, the knowledge transfer was easy due to how simple Opta is.

Opta is a product I would easily recommend any engineering team to try out today and do more with your time and other resources.

Wrapping up

You, too, can start using Opta today, you can get started here, and If you run into any issues or errors, you can reach out to the contributors in our slack channel here who are waiting to help.