Stephen Hedlund & Brock Beyer Speak C-Suite

In this episode of Speaking C-Suite, hosts Johnnie Walker (Rooled) and David Hemenway (The Angel Nest) sit down with Stephen Hedlund, head of finance at Rillet, and Brock Beyer, controller at Jump, to talk about building an AI native general ledger and what it looks like to run finance on top of it. Stephen walks through his path from corporate finance at Walmart to a NetSuite implementation that took eighteen months instead of six, and why that experience led him to join Rillet when it was ten employees with effectively zero customers. Rillet now supports more than 600 finance teams and has started pulling companies off SAP and Oracle Fusion in addition to QuickBooks, with implementations that take about four weeks compared to six to twelve months for a legacy ERP. Brock shares how he set up Jump's finance stack as its first accounting hire, moving off QuickBooks and building every other tool around Rillet as the foundation. He describes migrating a full month of transaction data in under 24 hours and closing Jump's books within weeks of going live, and explains how he splits his own AI usage between Rillet's built-in automations and custom tools he builds separately for reporting. Key topics include: Why legacy ERP implementations take months longer than they need to Rillet's customer success team of former CPAs who can speak to GL impact directly How Rillet's CSMs use AI agents to ship production code Automating capitalization thresholds and prepaid subledgers to cut manual work What broke first when Jump scaled from 40 to 200 employees Migrating a company's full transaction history in under a day Deciding when to use platform-native automation versus building your own Where Rillet is headed as a platform for agentic finance Speaking C-Suite is supported by Aleph, Rillet, Tabs, and Taxwire. This episode features Rillet's own head of finance as a guest. Thank you for helping make this series possible. Subscribe on YouTube and follow Speaking C-Suite for conversations with operators shaping the future of finance and growth.