Santiago Nestares is co-founder of New York City-based DualEntry, an AI-native ERP and accounting platform built for mid-market finance teams that has raised $100 million in the last 18 months. Nestares oversees the company’s own finance and operations, which run on DualEntry internally.
What’s in your tech stack?
We run our finance org on DualEntry. GL, AR, AP, multi-entity consolidations, bank reconciliations, all of it. We use the product we build, which keeps us honest.
Around it, the stack is small on purpose:
Linear for everything, not just engineering. Finance, ops, and marketing all log tickets there. Context lives in one place instead of being trapped in someone’s inbox.
Slack for daily comms.
Notion for docs and one-page decision briefs.
Discord as our virtual office. Teams spin up focus rooms without a meeting invite.
The rule we follow: keep the GL strong and let it talk natively to everything else. If your data is sitting in silos, no tool on top of it will save you.
What’s your joy and what’s your headache?
Joy: watching close go from days to hours. Bank rec used to be a three-day workflow. Now it runs in the background, agents match at 90 to 95 percent after they learn your patterns, and the team spends time on judgment calls instead of typing. That’s hundreds of hours back every month.
Headache: the ERP services ecosystem. Legacy vendors built a racket where consultants charge $30K to $40K just to wire up an integration, then bill you again every time your business changes. We’ve met the CEOs of some of these companies. They openly joke it was a race to the crappiest implementation experience, because complexity equals billable hours. Customers come to us burned by that cycle, and untangling them takes more energy than building the actual software.
If you could wave a magic wand, what would you make software companies do for you?
Stop treating data migration as someone else’s problem. Most ERP vendors hand it off to a third party, do trial-balance-only loads and lose every transaction since inception. Then they wonder why the AI on top is useless. Of course it’s useless. You stripped the context out.
Build the pipes clean. Tell me exactly which fields sync, which direction and which system wins when there’s a conflict. The fancy features will work better for it, and I won’t need to hire a consultant to translate.
What’s your best piece of tech advice for others in your job?
Don’t buy software because it’s modern. Buy it because it gives time back. The only metric that matters is the delta. Close days. Hours per workflow. Headcount per $100M of revenue. If a vendor can’t show you that math on the first call, the demo is theater.
One more thing: cancel every recurring meeting once a quarter. Most won’t get rescheduled. The ones that do, you actually needed.
