Ambrook

"After visiting a customer's farm and seeing the level of intention and control the operator had over their business, I want anything we automate at Ambrook to reinforce that, not erode it." Ben Kaplan joined Ambrook to work on problems that feel tangible and economically real. He's excited about embedding with customers to understand how technology can specifically serve small businesses and owner-operators. Before, Ben was at Thrive Capital, where he partnered with portfolio companies to build data stacks and drive operational decisions with data. Welcome to the team, Ben!

We work with a general contractor in the Twin Cities. Zach spent 10 years in advertising before he started renovating kitchens and bathrooms. Now he runs the whole operation, from materials sourcing to client relationships to the books. QuickBooks wasn't working for him, but it's not because anything was necessarily broken. It's that the platform was built for every industry, which means it wasn't built for Zach's industry. He told us: "It felt like I was doing terribly as a business." But he knew that wasn't true: he had bought a houseful of materials recently and would get paid by the client in a couple weeks. QuickBooks was just confusing a normal cash gap for a bad month. In order for Zach to see exactly what a job cost and what it returned, he regularly had to put in hours of manual tagging. Every Friday, instead of getting time to run the numbers and make decisions about his projects, he was blocking off 6 hours to organize his books by hand. Then he found Ambrook. He started tagging transactions by project instead of just by category, and bank syncs and AI matching did the categorization for him. Within 3 months, bookkeeping dropped from 6 hours a week to less than 1. $1.6M+ in annual inflows and outflows are now running through one platform, and he's had zero friction switching his clients over. And Zach is putting that extra time back into the job: sourcing tile from the right supplier, meeting with cabinetmakers, and partnering with his clients. There are millions of independent, project-based businesses like this. I'm thinking of contractors, remodelers, tradespeople. The bookkeeping software out there is built for "every business," which in practice means it's built for none of them. Nobody sets out to buy "contractor accounting software", but business owners do want to understand which jobs are making them money and which ones are costing them. It's what enables them to build family-run businesses that last for generations. That's what we're building at Ambrook.

Meet Stephanie Johnson 🐄 She went from spending up to 12 hours on manual bookkeeping per week to consistently getting the books done in 3 hours. When you're managing an agricultural consulting business, cattle, equipment brokerage, and homeschooling six kids, having that time back is a big deal. Stephanie and her husband Eric run Single Iron Management outside Baker City, Oregon. Both of them grew up in agriculture and knew the ins and outs of running family operation from a young age. Before using Ambrook, Stephanie would have to enter, explain, and review every single transaction by hand. She often felt like she was falling behind. After switching: → Cut weekly bookkeeping time from 12 hours to 3 → All transactions recorded automatically → Tracked profit across 15 different projects Read her story: https://lnkd.in/gHTpjj_H

Crystal Luo was sold on joining Ambrook the moment she learned we were having a Tomato Tomato Party. "Everyone I met on the team was extremely passionate, curious, and caring. Throughout all my interactions, I could tell they cared deeply about their customers, their team, and ultimately the person they were bringing on. Also, I saw the beautiful NYC office and was instantly in awe... then I heard something about a Tomato Tomato Party? I knew I had to be there!" Before Ambrook, Crystal was an operations associate at the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, working in the AI and tech for good space. She's also passionate about NYC's food and beverage community, with roots in hospitality. Welcome to the team, Crystal!

Meet Clark Warner 🌾 Clark is a sixth-generation farmer in Goshen, Indiana, running a diversified operation that he wants his kids to inherit one day. The farm grows corn, wheat, and hay, but he and his wife also run a wedding venue and Airbnbs. Clark is moving the operation towards livestock and direct-to-consumer beef, too. Before, bookkeeping was the thing that always got pushed. He tried QuickBooks and Excel, but both felt difficult to stay on top of. Then he switched to Ambrook: → Discovered the $47K cost of operating a rented wedding barn → Uncovered $57K a year in utility bills → Built a weekly bookkeeping rhythm Read his story: https://lnkd.in/gnSqtWEH

When Aryn gets on calls with an Ambrook customer, they're often sitting inside a 4,000-pound combine or doing their books from the field. That's why flexibility is such an important part of bookkeeping for farms. Aryn understands this well. She spent 12 years running a regenerative livestock operation, alongside a bookkeeping company and a general excavation business. She was the producer trying to make sense of the numbers; she was also the bookkeeper trying to make the numbers make sense. Now at Ambrook, she loves seeing things click for other operators: when they see how simple the books could be, or when the numbers finally reflect their gut instincts about the business. Watch her full interview with Morning Ag Clips at the link in the comments.

Meet Larry and Kelly Choate 🐑 Larry and Kelly raise lamb on 225 acres of pastureland in Greensboro, Georgia. Most of their customers are local: restaurants, butcher shops, and farmers markets that are within just a few hours' drive. It's a multi-generational operation, with father and daughter running the day-to-day together. Larry and Kelly have built the business around high-quality lamb and close relationships with the people they sell to. Before Ambrook, their books lived in a year-end shoebox. Expenses got recorded after the fact, mainly for Schedule F reporting, and it was hard to use those numbers to make business decisions. After switching: → Made a $5,000 equipment investment that paid back in 12 months → Saved hundreds a month on feed after analyzing purchase patterns → Shifted bookkeeping from a year-end scramble to a monthly rhythm Read their story: https://lnkd.in/gy56KxjM

Most accounting tools don't know the difference between a cow-calf operation and a feedlot. Ambrook does. Tomorrow, we're hosting a free live walkthrough built specifically for cattle producers with our very own, Abby Gudgell, a former commercial beef industry rep. What we’ll cover: + Tracking profitability by herd, pasture, or enterprise so you can see which parts of the operation are generating returns + Capturing receipts and tagging purchases from the field, in real time + Sending invoices and tracking payments for cattle sales, custom work, or other ranch income + Paying vendors and managing bills, including mailed checks and 1099 tracking + Issuing team cards with spending limits Plus, a live Q&A with our team. See you there! Register today: https://luma.com/zo620ed9

We open sourced the curriculum we ran internally to accelerate AI adoption among our team. It was specifically designed to level up folks no matter their technical background, as well as give the eng team space to experiment + build a lot of the infra we needed. These are the results we saw, in six weeks: → We built a declarative pipeline where agents triage incoming issues, scope them, write the fix, and open a deploy-ready PR, with a single human review at the end. Engineering shifted from writing most bug fixes to reviewing them. → We increased our support AI resolution rate from 20% to 50%, thanks to content loops that keep our help center current. → Everyone on the team shipped a feature or bug fix in the product, and our 75th percentile time-to-resolution dropped 35%. → Our sales team built an agent that briefs reps before every call, cutting prep time from 5-10 minutes to under a minute. → Non-engineers authored skills and pushed them to our shared repo, so the whole company benefits from what each person figures out. January was our busiest month ever, with 4x the customer signups of the year before, all arriving at once to set up their books before tax season. We made it through largely because of earlier investments in automation, but we saw that with new AI tools, we had an opportunity for our team to scale even further. So we ran Momentum Month: a company-wide sprint where everyone learned to identify, build, run, and evaluate their own AI workflows. The premise behind it is simple, and it's something we believe deeply at Ambrook: everyone should be a builder. The structure was a big part of what made it work. We cleared the calendar of recurring meetings and added back only the essential ones, stood up a "platform" pod to build the core infrastructure, and embedded a "visiting engineer" with each pod of operators. Their job was to consult and unblock, but they were explicitly not allowed to build the automations for their teammates. The real unlock wasn't individual productivity, which we already had. It was making everyone a builder on top of shared infrastructure, regardless of someone’s technical background, so that the gains compound across the whole company. And we came away with a lot more empathy for our customers, who are adopting these tools right alongside us. Check out the full process write-up and the open-sourced curriculum here: https://lnkd.in/ghXRMtYx