# John Glasgow

John Glasgow is the founder of Campfire, which builds AI-native ERP software for finance teams.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/john-glasgow/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnglasgow
- LinkedIn followers: 23,024
- Median of last 7 posts: 106 reactions, 7 comments (checked 2026-11-02)
- Topics: artificial-intelligence
- Based on 8 dated posts, latest 2026-10-05

## Summary

They are most useful for a founder's perspective on finance software, ERP change, and AI in finance teams.

- Best for: Finance-software brands selling to corporate finance teams for founder-led thought leadership, podcast, webinar, or partnership.
- Not for: A consumer brand, non-finance software vendor, or competing ERP or accounting system.
- Check first: Confirm audience breakdown by job function, seniority, company size, geography and engagement results.

### Takeaways

- ERP migrations stall because teams dread the move, not because they lack reasons to switch.
- Agents should carry tedious accounting work while a person keeps the judgment call.
- Payroll belongs in the same system as the ledger.

## Main ideas

- **ERP migrations stall because teams dread the move, not because they lack reasons to switch**: Glasgow's core diagnosis is that finance teams tolerate bad systems because the replacement process looks worse than the problem. The argument comes from three seats he says he occupied: corporate finance, the accounts receivable side at Invoice2go, and the accounts payable and partnership side at Bill.com after its acquisition of Invoice2go. Looking back from the finance team's chair, the deciding factor was not feature comparison but the prospect of a long migration to software everyone already disliked. That experience is the stated basis for applying to Y Combinator to build the general ledger he wished his own team had been on.
- **Agents should carry the tedious accounting work while a person keeps the judgment call**: The most consistent design position across the posts is a division of labor: an agent handles the mechanical parts of an entry, and a human approves it. Glasgow frames this as how he wants AI in finance to work, not as a limitation. Entries prepared by an agent are approved by a person and logged with a full audit trail, and the Slack post says the accrual feature was built to be audit- and SOX-ready. The workflow stays inside the thread where the team already works so the context stays attached to the entry.
- **Payroll belongs in the same system as the ledger**: Glasgow argues payroll is one of the largest expenses for any business and the one teams understand least, because it has always lived in a different system from financial data. The Campfire-ADP announcement positions the fix as more than a native payroll integration: the company describes an MCP connection between the two products so agents can work across reporting and accounting. The stated goal is finance teams spending less time reporting numbers and more time affecting them. Glasgow credits Joseph Algerio and the ADP team as partners on the work.
- **The close and the forecast should be continuous rather than month-end events**: Campfire's product posts treat the accounting close as something that should run while the month is still open instead of after it ends. Glasgow describes Forecast as the first ERP that calls the month before the close, and the partnership post describes a continuous and autonomous close and forecast. The commercial argument attached to it is that finance teams can stop spending their time reporting the numbers and start spending it influencing them.
- **Accounting is moving from transactional work to strategic work, and convening finance leaders is how the category advances**: The billboard post states the thesis directly: accounting is moving from transactional to strategic, which makes it an exciting time to be in the seat. Basecamp, which Glasgow describes as the largest AI conference for corporate finance teams, is the vehicle for that argument, mixing hands-on labs with sessions on running AI at enterprise scale and going agentic in an audit environment. Guest speakers and their employers are named in the posts, and their views should be read as their own rather than Glasgow's.
- **Publishing shipping velocity and naming incumbents is part of the message**: The recurring promotional format is a first-person milestone post, and one of its functions is to make pace itself the argument. The September recap counts 22 product updates and a record month of new ARR, then folds in stage appearances, a webinar with Ramp, a conversation with a customer's accounting chief, and European customer wins. Legacy ERP displacement is stated directly: London customers moving off NetSuite, and a founding post about a migration that never happened.

## Work to read

- [How Campfire’s founding story came from three finance roles](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnglasgow_the-most-common-question-i-get-is-to-hear-activity-7510801622927777793-p-n8)
- [How Glasgow describes AI working inside a finance team](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnglasgow_weve-been-working-hard-to-make-campfire-activity-7521629262769045504-6_mK)
- [Campfire’s announced ADP integration and finance-agent workflow](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnglasgow_today-we-announced-our-strategic-partnership-activity-7523139969801125888-yqNH)
- [A month of Campfire product updates and market signals](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnglasgow_september-was-our-biggest-month-of-product-activity-7512920700215738368-3cRR)

## Brand relationships

- **Campfire** (owned_business)
- **ADP** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Ramp** (disclosed_partnership)
- **Bill.com** (employment)
- **Invoice2go** (employment)
- **Adobe** (employment)
- **Y Combinator** (mention)

## Partnerships

Campfire's disclosed partnership activity runs through three routes: a product-level strategic partnership, a founder-led conference that sells sponsorships, and co-hosted webinars or conference sessions with other finance-software companies. The clearest example is ADP: Glasgow announced a strategic partnership with the payroll provider, described as an MCP integration built directly between the two products, live for shared customers and announced jointly. The other recurring route is Basecamp, the AI conference for corporate finance teams that Glasgow runs, which lists sponsors across payments, payroll, audit and advisory and drew 500+ finance leaders. Nothing supplied states pricing, deliverable lists, deadlines or application steps for any of these, so treat the requirements below as terms to settle with Campfire rather than published terms.

## Alternatives

- Sun Choi: Choose Sun Choi when the brand wants a working finance operator's verdict rather than a vendor founder's launch narrative. Sun Choi advises multiple startups from seed to Series B and writes comparative tool roundups from the buyer's seat, placing AP and card tools (Ramp, Brex), accounts receivable automation (Tabs), and ERP candidates including Campfire, Rillet, Everest, and DualEntry side by side with the tradeoffs between them, such as Ramp's operating-account yield versus Brex's FDIC coverage, and calling out where legacy players like Recurly and Zuora have fallen behind. A separate post walks through board-meeting preparation. For a brief that asks finance leaders to evaluate AI-native accounting tools, this is the closest read to the reader's own decision: a practitioner testing software at early-stage companies and reporting what moves the needle, which suits an interview or a category-comparison panel.
- Charles Howe: Choose Charles Howe when the brand wants an essay-style thought-leadership piece built on one argument, rather than a launch- or event-driven post. The two reviewed posts each develop a single thesis with data and a worked example: one frames AI in finance as an architecture gap, contrasting the near-universal claims of agentic adoption with the share of AP teams still keying invoices by hand, then walks through a property operator's utility bills being read, split by service address, coded, and held for human approval when the line items do not sum. The other shows that real approval chains depend on where a cost is going, using a foundation contractor that routes bills by a letter inside the job number, a construction company with vendor-and-amount exceptions, and a property manager with per-building approvers. That style fits a jointly authored explainer on approval boundaries, auditability, and where a person stays in the loop, which is the same human-sign-off theme the John Glasgow brief is built around.
- Brian Chess: Choose Brian Chess when the brand needs enterprise-scale distribution and a direct look at how finance teams use AI inside the tools they already open. One reviewed post reports what customers actually ask an ERP, drawn from thousands of Ask Oracle conversations, and shows the questions escalating from overdue invoices to what is driving a cash shortage and which costs are pressuring margins. The other announces a Finance Analyst skill delivered inside Claude and ChatGPT, covering close management, reconciliations, variance analysis, AR and AP aging, and board reporting, with controls built in. For a brief about AI-native accounting, this is the closest match on real usage patterns and on the bring-your-own-AI platform angle, and the ecosystem-level framing, meeting finance teams inside third-party LLM tools rather than only in a proprietary product, is a neutral topic a brand can co-host without promoting a single challenger.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/