How the Secret CFO runs his own books on Campfire

The Secret CFO is a CFO at heart. But somewhere along the way, he became an accidental media entrepreneur, with an audience of more than 60,000, a team to support him, and sponsors.

That also gave him his own set of books to run. It had been nearly 20 years since he last posted a journal entry, so being hands-on in the accounting system was never going to be his favorite part of the job.

When he agreed his first sponsor deal a couple of years ago, he needed a legal entity and a way to send an invoice, so he did what many founders do: he opened a QuickBooks Online account.

It worked for a while. But as sponsor deals grew in size and complexity, he wanted monthly management accounts alongside the weekly KPIs he was used to reviewing as a CFO.

The sticking point was deferred revenue. Sponsors paid up front, but revenue was recognized when their content was published. Each month, he sent a spreadsheet to his CPA, Sami, showing when that should happen. Publishing dates moved, though, and the spreadsheet did not always keep up. And then the bank feeds would drop several times a month.

The accounts got done, but only after he had worked through the transactions and corrected the deferred revenue schedule. The results would sit in his inbox for a couple of weeks, which made them kind of pointless.

It was around this time a year ago, The Secret CFO first met Campfire’s founder John. The Secret CFO told him he was cynical about what an “AI-native ERP” really meant. John challenged him to “see for himself”, so he accepted the challenge.

And at the start of the year, The Secret CFO moved his books to Campfire. Implementation took about six weeks, led by Nils, Campfire’s implementation guru.

Campfire now gives the team a live view of the bank, while corporate card integrations bring in around 90% of spend into the GL already tagged. The biggest change, though, has been revenue recognition. Campfire’s billing module parses sponsor contracts and turns their payment terms into structured data. An integration with the team’s content management system then tracks when contracted content is published. When a newsletter is marked as published, Campfire gets the signal to recognize the revenue.

Campfire’s Ember agents help power that workflow. Together, these changes have brought the monthly close down to a few days. The Secret CFO and Sami now review the numbers within a week of month end, with a goal of getting that down to one or two days by the end of the year.

The team is also working on dashboards that combine reader and financial metrics, powered by Campfire, and Slack notifications for upcoming due dates on outstanding invoices. Both are expected to go live in the coming weeks.

“Shoutout to Nils for doing a great job with my Campfire implementation. I was seriously impressed when I saw revenue recognition happen automatically with Campfire talking directly to my content management system and CRM. It showed me what AI can do in the background when it has the right embedded guardrails: turn messy information into data the ERP can actually use. In the past, that would have been a tech project, well beyond the reach of most small businesses. Now I get my numbers much faster, without having to give my CPA a running commentary on every sponsor deal and publishing date. The context is there already.”