How top finance teams scale 20x without hiring, featuring Campfire's CEO

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Spendsetter: John Glasgow, CEO at Campfire

AI can review all 10 million transactions in your books. Your auditors only check a few thousand.

After years in corporate finance at Adobe and partnering with leading ERP providers, John Glasgow founded Campfire to rebuild the general ledger from scratch with AI at its core. Now he's sharing the playbook for how lean finance teams are scaling 20x without adding headcount.

Step one: Get your data off the spreadsheet

Before AI can do anything useful, it needs to be able to see your data. And if your data lives in spreadsheets, reconciliations, close checklists, accrual subledgers, it's effectively invisible. The first move isn't buying a new AI tool. It's getting everything into software. That's the prerequisite.

Campfire's monitoring agent

Most finance leaders think about AI as something that does work: coding transactions, drafting accruals, building models. John's monitoring agent at Campfire flips that. Every few minutes, it sweeps through all of the transactional accounting in the system, checks it against your accounting policies and Big Four guidance, and surfaces anything that looks off, like a prepaid expense that misses your materiality threshold or a transaction that wasn't coded to policy. You can ignore the flag for good reason. Or you can catch something that slipped through.

That's the reframe most folks haven't fully considered: not AI doing the work, but AI reviewing the humans doing the work. A second set of eyes that never sleeps.

What this looks like in practice

The highest-value use case today isn't full automation. It's AI doing a first pass, then a human reviewing and approving. At publicly traded companies on Campfire, AI drafts the accrual, pulls supporting documentation, and submits it into the approval queue. A human reviews and approves, the same human-to-human workflow as before, just without the 10 minutes of manual prep per entry.

That's not replacing accountants. That's giving them time back. And it compounds. When the close shrinks from 15 to 5 days, accounting teams suddenly have time for the analysis that used to belong exclusively to FP&A: margin trends, vendor spend reviews, working capital conversations at the board level.

The accountant of the future

Two things are emerging. The first is systems management: knowing how to oversee AI and automation, while still having the technical chops to know when it got something wrong. The second is the strategic controller, the finance leader who uses the time AI gives back to go deeper on the business.

The analogy John keeps coming back to: when Excel came out, accountants didn't disappear. The art of the possible just got bigger. We're in that same moment now.