Firtop: Stop Deciding on Stale Numbers

Written By Guest User

Santa Cruz locals Eric and Emily Helbush launched Firtop to give small businesses real-time books. Its agentic layer sits atop QuickBooks, Xero, and existing tools, closing continuously instead of monthly. Firtop presents at the monthly New Tech on October 7. This article submitted by Eric and Emily.

I grew up in Santa Cruz. The first set of books I ever closed belonged to my parents, who still run their small business here today. Emily and I also live here too, with our two kids.

Emily and I have spent years on the finance and operations side of scaling technology companies. The best decisions are those that are made with current financial and operating data. The expensive ones aren't.

Most founders and business owners are working without the information they need to run their business. The books close weeks after the month ends, sometimes months. By the time the reporting lands, the decision it was meant to inform has already been made, and you're steering by looking at where the business used to be. Most owners assume this is their own failing, when it's really how the whole industry has worked for a long time. QuickBooks, Xero and other accounting systems can close much sooner than that. The habits that grew up around them just never enabled it.

That's why we started Firtop.

We're building an agentic layer that sits on top of the systems a business already runs. Same accounting system, same billing, same CRM and payroll. We aren't asking anyone to replace their tools. The layer reads from what's already there and writes back to it, and instead of closing the books once a month, it does it continuously. You decide which systems it can change. A forecast that updates when something happens is worth far more than one somebody rebuilds in a spreadsheet every month, at best.

The layer handles the transaction coding and matching and reconciling that used to eat a bookkeeper's week, and hands exceptions to a human for review. Every number traces back to where it came from. And we don't train AI models on your data.

The view you get of your own business isn't only the P&L. Revenue and cost sit next to the operating metrics that explain them, pulled from your CRM, your product data, wherever the business actually keeps them. Most owners have never had all of it in one place.

People ask whether this could have been done ten years ago. Mostly, it couldn't. Only in the last few years has the tooling evolved to the point where it can support agent-directed action across API connections. That part is new. Knowing which numbers matter is not new, and that's the part we've spent our careers on.

What drives us to action is how little of this has reached small and early-stage companies. If your books live in QuickBooks, Xero or anything like them, the tooling that large tech-forward finance teams take for granted was never built with you in mind. We'd like to change that.

We're presenting at Santa Cruz Works New Tech on October 7. Come learn more about what we're building and get your questions answered.

Eric and Emily Helbush, both CPAs (inactive), are the co-founders of Firtop LLC in Santa Cruz. firtop.com

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