Why CentSight
Every firm will be using AI on client work. The only decision left is how.
That decision deserves more thought than it usually gets. A tool that is fluent about finance and a tool that is built for it look identical in a demo — and diverge the moment a partner has to sign the output.
The starting point
How will your firm adopt?
Firms are already being asked about it — by clients comparing them against practices that moved earlier, and by their own teams, some of whom started pasting client figures into a general chat window months ago. The question was never whether. It's build it, buy it, or wait — and it's worth being honest about what each one actually takes.
Wait it out
Left behind
The option that feels safest. Clients start comparing you against firms that moved earlier, and ask why you haven't.
Build it yourself
Years and real money, for a maybe
Client data separation, verifiable math and live bank integrations are a product, not a project. Finance leaders shouldn't be living in GitHub.
Adopt the best
Ahead of the curve
The best firms have always been the first adopters of the best technology. You didn't rebuild QuickBooks when you started your firm — did you?
Path two, honestly
What building it actually takes.
Not an argument that it can't be done — an account of what has to be true before the output is something a professional will put their name on.
- Client data that cannot leak between clients
- Every query, cache and log scoped per client, permanently. 95% right is the same as wrong.
- Math that's verified, not generated
- Ledger semantics built in — accrual timing, non-recurring items, seasonality — not just a chat window on top.
- Integrations, then the upkeep
- Token refreshes, schema changes, silent sync failures. Every week, indefinitely.
- A standard someone's licence rests on
- Defensible to the client, and to whoever reviews it after them.
Build your own enterprise-grade, client-ready AI — cost estimate
- CTO + PM
- $300K–$410K
- External dev firm
- $150K–$250K
- Infra + LLM / API costs
- $30K–$80K
- Compliance / security
- $20K–$40K
Illustrative estimate for the first year of building in-house, at US market rates for the roles and services listed.
Maintained for you
Someone has to keep the connections working.
It shouldn't be your senior associate. CentSight holds the read-only QuickBooks and bank connections itself, so a changed API or a sync that goes quiet is our week rather than yours — and everything built after today arrives without a migration, a project plan, or a line in next year's budget.
- More on the way
How firms adopt it
Nobody starts by handing this to a client.
Adoption runs on a ladder your firm controls. Most start on the first rung, stay there as long as they like, and never have to climb at all.
- 01
Where every firm starts
Internal only
Advisors use CentSight as their own tool — asking, reviewing, and deciding what's ready before anything reaches a client.
- 02
Once it has earned it
Read-only client access
Clients see the work an advisor creates in the tool — reports, analysis, answers — without touching it directly themselves.
- 03
If and when you want it
Full client access
Clients get their own access: a 24/7 financial analyst working for them, inside the workspace your firm still controls.
The firm decides which rung it is on, and when that changes. Nothing moves to a client without you putting it there.
What each rung looks like in practice depends on what you sell:
Common questions
What firms ask before they decide.
We were already planning to build something like this internally. What changes?
The scope, mostly. A chat window over an export is a weekend. Per-client separation, figures computed against the ledger rather than written by a model, and live connections that keep working are the four things that make the output signable — and each one is a product commitment with no end date rather than a project you finish.
Our team already gets real value out of ChatGPT. Why add anything?
Because it is genuinely useful, and because the places it breaks down are specific rather than general — multi-client separation, live data, and numbers that can't be re-prompted into a different answer. We put that side by side, row by row, on the comparison page rather than asking you to take it on faith.
We're a large firm with a real technology budget. Isn't building the better bet?
It's genuinely viable at that size, which is more than we'd say for most firms. The question is whether a multi-year build is the best use of that budget when the result has to beat something already maintained full-time — and whether your senior finance people should be spending those years on a codebase.
What happens to our clients' books if we stop using CentSight?
Nothing. CentSight connects read-only to the books a client already keeps — nothing is migrated in and nothing is written back, so the system of record stays exactly where it is and stays yours.
Isn't waiting another year the low-risk option?
It's the one that feels lowest-risk, which is different. Waiting is a decision to let clients form their expectations somewhere else first, and to start the learning curve later than the firms they're comparing you against.
You’re going to pick something. Pick it deliberately.
Bring a client’s books and the questions your team actually gets asked. We’ll show you what it does with them, and talk through what embedding CentSight into your firm would look like.