Starling Expense Cards, Copilot Skills in Excel, Pilot Meridian and Puzzle AI Close || In The Loop

Ryan Pearcy is joined by Kevin Fitzgerald and Leigh Stallard for a bumper week of accounting tech news, and a period close nobody can stop talking about. Starling has rolled out expense cards, ringfenced spending spaces and read-only access for bookkeepers and accountants. Kevin sees a bank pulling small business finance workflow into the banking platform, and wonders what comes next, because it does not feel like a bank would do expenses and then stop. Leigh names who just lost their lunch, and why being a bank is one of the few moats left standing. Microsoft has taught Copilot in Excel repeatable skills, so a team can define the steps for a model, a close or a variance analysis once and have it run the same way twice. Leigh reckons Microsoft has given up trying to kill Excel and started building where everyone already is. Ryan is more excited than he expected to be, with one caveat: most firms have not written their workflows down yet. Sage is embedding its accounting technology inside Satago, opening invoice finance to sole traders and micro businesses. Leigh has history here and talks through the revenue-per-customer logic, and why adoption decides whether any of it ever gets seen. Kevin's read is that this is a new financial service rather than a workflow improvement, and the open question is who the customer thinks they are dealing with. Then the close. Puzzle has brought AI Close to accountants with what it calls programmatic accounting, and Pilot has launched Meridian, which it says runs month end from start to finish. Ryan makes the case for AI-native ledgers being the real battleground. Kevin questions whether the standalone players survive it. Leigh has a warning for any firm buying these tools without first telling the team what they will be doing instead. Ryan brings Employment Hero's AI Paradox research, 8,800 business leaders and employees across four markets, which found the most AI-heavy businesses hiring the most people rather than the fewest. That runs into the skills gap underneath it, whether AI skills belong on a job spec at all, and how you would ever vet them. Also covered: Inscope's agentic disclosure checklist and its agent Penny, Socket wiring won proposals straight into Sodium, Content Snare adding FuseSign and Annature signing, and Joiin's Q2 release with AI agents, live Stripe data and drill-down to individual transactions. We also hear from our sponsor, Advancetrack! www.advancetrack.com Chapters 00:00 Intro 04:04 Ad break 04:42 Starling adds expense cards and read-only access for accountants 08:35 Copilot in Excel learns your close, one skill at a time 12:53 Sage embeds its accounting technology inside Satago 17:06 Puzzle brings AI Close to accountants with programmatic policies 20:48 Inscope launches an agentic disclosure checklist 23:35 Pilot launches Meridian and claims it closes the books end to end 26:49 Win the work in Socket, run the client in Sodium 28:38 Employment Hero finds AI-heavy businesses hiring the most people 40:35 Content Snare adds FuseSign and Annature signing 42:41 Joiin's Q2 release brings AI agents and live Stripe data 49:08 Outro