About Cairn
Built from the inside out
Not a Silicon Valley startup guessing what accountants need. Cairn was built by someone who sat in the chair, reconciled the accounts, and watched the spreadsheets pile up.
The Origin
Born in a real accounting firm
Every tool in the Cairn suite started the same way — watching a real accounting firm work, day after day, and noticing where the cracks were.
Bank statements arrived as PDFs and got retyped by hand. Client status lived in someone's head or on a whiteboard that hadn't been updated in two weeks. Tax return tracking was a spreadsheet that everyone was afraid to touch because it might break.
Cairn wasn't built to fill a market gap. It was built to fix specific problems at a specific firm — and it turns out those problems are universal.
The Philosophy
Tested on a real firm before it ships
Every feature in Cairn is tested on a real accounting firm before it ships. Not beta-tested — actually used. Day in, day out, with real client data and real deadlines.
If a feature doesn't make the work faster or more accurate, it doesn't get built. If it adds complexity without clear value, it gets cut. There's no roadmap driven by feature requests from a focus group. There's a firm doing real work, and tools that either help or don't.
The result is software that feels like it was made by someone who understands the work — because it was.
The Architecture Decision
Your data. Your walls. Your database.
Single-tenant isn't the cheap path. It isn't the easy path. Every firm gets its own database, its own containers, its own walls. It costs more to run and more to maintain.
We chose it anyway — because accounting data demands it. Your clients' financials don't sit in a shared database next to another firm's data with a row-level filter pretending to be security. They live in their own space, completely isolated.
If a firm leaves, their data leaves with them. If a firm needs a compliance audit, their data is clean and separate. If something goes wrong with one firm's deployment, it affects no one else.
Every firm is completely isolated — no shared tables, no shared containers.
The Suite Approach
Focused tools, not a monolithic platform
Most accounting software tries to be everything. One platform, one login, every feature crammed into a single interface that does a lot of things adequately and none of them well.
Cairn is different. Each tool does one thing exceptionally well. Statements processes bank statement PDFs. Clients tracks reconciliation engagements. Returns manages the tax year. They work independently, and they work better together.
Your firm picks the tools it needs. No bloated bundle, no features you'll never touch. Build your own stack — your own cairn — with exactly what makes your firm faster.
Every firm's cairn looks different.
See what's in the stack
Every tool is built with the same philosophy — tested on a real firm, focused on one job, designed to be fast. Explore what Cairn can do for yours.