Hey Archie!

When Agus, Bruce, and I started Waverley Studios in early 2023, the goal was straightforward: create space to explore big ideas and build impactful companies. Sometimes an idea comes along that changes everything.

That's what happened with Archie.

Archie started as an offshoot of another project where we were exploring how AI could make sense of complex data. The deeper we went, the more we realized something important: in AI, domain knowledge isn't optional. It's essential.

And if there's one domain we know inside and out, it's accounting.

The Problem We Saw

The accounting industry is caught in a structural squeeze. There aren't enough accountants in the world to do all the work that needs doing. Each year, fewer people are available to handle an increasing workload. The talent shortage isn't improving. Industry bodies haven't made the profession attractive enough to bring in new talent at scale. Firms can't hire their way out anymore.

Around that shrinking workforce, the environment keeps getting tougher. Governments introduce and change regulations constantly, making compliance more complex and expensive to deliver. Clients feel their own economic pressure and push hard on fees. They want more, faster, for less. Private equity often shows up thinking it can solve everything with scale and capital, but it tends to aggregate operational problems rather than fix them.

Inside the firm, all of this pressure collapses onto partners, managers, and staff. Partners are squeezed from both sides: clients demanding lower fees on one end, rising cost-to-produce on the other. The work simply takes too long and requires too many human hours to be completed at a compelling margin. Managers and seniors sit in the middle, taking pressure from partners above and staff below, constantly reviewing, correcting, and chasing files to keep jobs moving.

At the base sits the staff accountant. Their day is dominated by one pattern: take data from one place, do something with it, put it somewhere else. Over and over, across emails, workpapers, trial balances, ledgers, and tax or audit systems. It's highly repetitive, highly structured, and absolutely essential. But it's slow.

When this work takes too long, the entire firm feels it. Jobs blow out, reviews back up, margins erode, and talented people burn out or leave.

What We're Building

Accountants don't need more task automation. They need someone to actually do the work that's been impossible to automate. The manual stuff that binds all the systems together. The form filling, the uploading and downloading, the submissions, the regulatory checks.

That's where Archie comes in.

We're building the connective tissue. Archie does the heavy lifting between all these different systems and processes, at a faster pace than humans ever could, with more accuracy, reliability, and consistency.

When we pitch Archie, we describe him as your best staff accountant, powered by AI. He reads messy client documents (PDFs, scanned images, emails with attachments), then structures that information into organized, system-ready formats. He performs calculations, from simple additions to complex depreciation schedules, with accounting-correct precision. He reconciles transactions across systems to catch discrepancies, even when vendor names don't quite match or dates are off by a day.

He analyzes data to spot trends, anomalies, and exceptions that actually matter. When something unusual appears, he doesn't just flag it. He reasons through why it happened and explains what it means in terms your clients can understand.

He searches through thousands of files to instantly find that one contract or prior-year workpaper you need. He drafts communications tailored to whoever needs them, whether it's a quick client email or a formal audit response. He generates complete deliverables, properly formatted and ready to send.

He learns your firm's way of doing things and remembers each client's quirks and preferences, getting smarter over time rather than forgetting like departing staff do. And when the work needs to actually get done in systems, he executes directly, handling all the tedious system work that would otherwise eat up your team's day.

Together, these capabilities form exactly what you'd expect from a skilled staff accountant: someone who can take raw information, process it correctly, spot what matters, and deliver professional results.

Why This Matters

The opportunity was staring us in the face. This company could address some of the biggest challenges accounting firms face: the growing talent shortage, too much time spent on repetitive work, and rising pressure to deliver more, faster, at better margins.

As exciting as the studio model was, this shift feels like the natural next step. Archie is where our focus needs to be.

This isn't goodbye to Waverley Studios. It's a celebration of what it made possible. And now, it's all systems go for Archie.

The vision is to build domain-specific AI that helps accountants deliver high-quality work at scale, handle significantly more clients, and become the advisors their clients deserve.

There's so much more to share about Archie in the months ahead. But for now, I couldn't be more excited about what's coming.

Onwards and upwards.