For 30 years, ERPs have been built for operations, and the general ledger got bolted on as an afterthought. Paul Peterson and Matt Barbieri argue that's exactly why so many finance leaders say "the accounting blows", and why it was never an accountant problem in the first place.

Fresh off Rillet Recon 2026, Matt shares what he saw in the room: a community that feels more like an apprenticeship than a conference, a live moment where 100 Claude licenses got handed out on the spot to attendees who'd never logged in, and an AI adoption gap in finance that's now an either-or, with very few in the middle.

From there, Paul and Matt dig into the harder questions. Why are companies hiring FP&A teams to do work their accountants are already trained to do? When a growing company outgrows QuickBooks, what's the right way to evaluate an ERP, without starting with the tool? And what does it actually look like to put accounting back at the center of the system, instead of bolted on at the end?

A candid conversation about what's broken in accounting systems, what Rillet is getting right, and what every finance leader should be asking before their next system decision.