Your Baby Is Ugly

We thought we had solved the problem.

And then, a client looked me in the eye and said,

“Ted, your baby is ugly.”

It stung. But it was also the truth.

The Beginning: A Tailgate, a Spark, and an Idea

In 2005, I was at a University of Maryland football tailgate when a fraternity friend told me about a new technology being marketed by Xerox called "electronic workflow".

He said, “Ted, in the future, people will have two monitors — they’ll look at documents on one screen and enter data into another.”

As hard as that might be to believe today, that seemed revolutionary at the time.

That night, I Googled “electronic workflow.” Within a month, we had identified a partner. My goal was simple: introduce electronic workflows to our clients to make accounting faster, cleaner, and more accurate.

The Breakthrough: Blackboard and the Birth of Finance-as-a-Service

In 2009, we received an RFP from Blackboard, a public company in Washington, D.C., looking to outsource its accounts payable.

We responded — and won — against 11 international outsourcing firms, some of the biggest in the industry. That engagement became what we now call the first Finance-as-a-Service (FaaS) contract.

We brought together people, process, and technology, building a custom application that integrated directly into PeopleSoft. Within 90 days, we exceeded every SLA, and Blackboard’s payables were running better than ever.

A year later, we earned the #1 spot on the Black Book of Outsourcing, ranking as the top accounting outsourcing firm, worldwide, based on client satisfaction.

Evolution: From RFSWorkflow to Easby

Over the next decade, we transformed that custom application into a SaaS accounting workflow engine supporting our small to midsized clients across all accounting functions.

Then, in 2020, came that proud moment — and the humbling feedback: “Your baby is ugly.”

On top of that, we had completed an acquisition of a smaller accounting outsourcing firm that supported over 20 client companies. We struggled over the next year integrating those 20 clients into RFSWorkflow.

We realized we were living on aging technology. It worked, but it couldn’t carry us — or our clients — into the future. So, we started looking for our next-generation platform partner.

This time, we didn’t choose a niche vendor. We chose a world-class organization: Appian, another D.C.-based public company known for its enterprise-grade process automation solution.

The team spent over six months designing the future version of Easby — not as a replacement, but as the full realization of what we had always envisioned.

By December 2024, we had migrated every user off RFSWorkflow. Since January of 2025, we have operated exclusively on Easby.

The Next Frontier: Intelligent, Agentic Workflows

Appian has turned on 15 AI skills, and we’re thoughtfully activating them within Easby to benefit our clients.

We’re evolving RFSWorkflow from an accounting workflow tool into a business intelligence and analytics platform for small to midsized companies. In 2025 we began activating full financial dataset for our clients. The combination of these financial datasets and our new financial management module will give our clients access to advanced KPI capabilities that are integrated into generative AI. Appian is bringing the data security required while our Easby platform already has the data governance built in.

Easby now supports the entire financial lifecycle of a company — from startup to exit.

But the technology is only the glue. It connects our workflows with our clients’ workflows and their accounting systems — which remain the system of record. Our U.S. based workforce manages all the space in between as we march towards our goal of 85% automation by 2030.

We bring 20+ years of experience in electronic workflow and years of machine learning development. Now, we’re implementing Agentic AI — intelligent workflows that use LLMs to reduce human intervention.

Our people are becoming more effective and most importantly, our clients are more satisfied than ever. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) jumped from 24 in September 2024 to 73 in September 2025.

The Takeaway: Embrace the Ugly Truth

Fifteen years after that first FaaS contract with Blackboard, we’re still building, improving, and evolving.

Sometimes, growth starts with a hard truth. Sometimes, you have to accept that your baby isn't perfect, that it needs support and nurturing. But if you put in the effort and maintain the discipline, your baby will grow and become something much more beautiful than you could ever image.

At ROSE, we’ve made the big investments to transform how finance operates. We’re here to share those benefits with business leaders who want to stay focused on their mission while we support them with infrastructure required to scale.

Because the future of finance isn’t about patching what’s broken — it’s about reinventing what’s possible.