How Mercury Books brought calm to Plantkind’s bookkeeping

Lily Bodnar is the founder of Plantkind, an outdoor spatial design company and landscape design studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. While Plantkind’s work is rooted in reconnecting people with the natural world, behind the scenes, the studio is driven by technology — with Mercury Books now providing a clear home base for its finances.

Bodnar has been a Mercury customer for five years, but bookkeeping was the one part of her business she could never get ahead of — not for lack of trying, but because every tool she tried buried the actual numbers under too much software.

Bodnar’s design background in UX, UI, and product design gave her an instinct that never left: if something looks cluttered or chaotic, she avoids it. Accounting software, it turns out, usually falls into that category. “Just thinking about it made me stressed,” she says.

Still, she ran through nearly every option out there — multiple attempts at one major platform, a stint with another, experiments with a couple of newer entrants. One tool was too bloated, trying to cram in every edge case until the interface stopped feeling usable for someone without an accounting background. Another moved slowly and stayed messy — she had reconciliation discrepancies that were hard to track down and resolve. The one that came closest to working was still a paid tool stacked on top of her banking, which didn’t feel right. At one point she started using screenshots of her own setup — banking in one browser tab, accounting in another, time tracking in a third — just to see the full financial picture of her business at once.

When Bodnar opened Mercury Books for the first time, she (literally) giggled out loud. “It was so perfectly obvious that this is what bookkeeping should be,” she says. The data she needs is easily accessible, not hidden a few layers into the product. The auto-reconciliation just works behind the scenes. And the toggle to easily go from banking to books and vice versa is one of those small details that show the intentionality that was brought into the product.

To Bodnar, the main benefit of Mercury Books is how much of her anxiety is now gone. Monthly close, the thing she'd always dreaded across a near-decade of running Plantkind, is now something that just happens. “It feels pure, calm. It’s the first accounting product [I’ve tried] that actually feels good to use,” she says.

A lot of it comes down to where Books lives. In previous systems, she used to have to manually mark invoices as paid. Now, since Books is part of the Mercury ecosystem, she has a single, reliable source of truth — and less busywork to boot. “Before it was this web of things trying to connect with each other,” she says. “Now Mercury is the source of truth, and everything else just builds outward from there.” The next step for Plantkind is building with Mercury MCP to further visualize financial data and workflows.

Plantkind is continuing to grow. Bodnar’s already planning to build out a team and launch productized services, plus garden design software down the line. As the business gets more complex, she plans to keep all her finances in one stack she already trusts. For Bodnar and Plantkind, Mercury Books means one less thing to dread, and one more thing that helps.