Joel Martin was a Mercury customer long before he launched his design and web development agency, Sitekick. Through his various business ventures, including a concert ticketing startup and a mobile oil change business based in Hawaii, Martin has learned what he likes and what makes banking a good fit – and for Joel, Mercury was it.
But the right solution for bookkeeping remained elusive. “It’s just so esoteric,” he says. “It’s full of terminology and conventions that only make sense if you’re an accountant, built into software that felt too bloated for business owners like me.” Despite trying several platforms over the years, he found every one unnecessarily complex for what his businesses actually needed.
I just want it to zero out my books and have it done mostly automatically. Mercury Books allows me to do just that.
When Martin was invited into the Mercury Books beta, he joined right away and was won over from the first login. He found the interface clean and easy to follow, and unlike anything else he’d used for bookkeeping before.
He also arrived with a real problem to solve: years of small, recurring miscategorizations, and a chart of accounts that had grown far past what a four-person agency actually needed. It was the kind of cleanup that calls for bookkeeping judgment he didn’t have. That’s where Mercury Command, working directly inside Books, closed the gap for him. Martin would flag a transaction type that had been miscategorized for years and ask for a mass fix. He’d then ask which accounts could be merged or deleted, and Command would propose consolidations and walk him through confirming each change. “It just worked super, super well,” he says.
It was also important to him that the rest of his stack could be connected to Books, versus siloed. Martin connected Stripe and Gusto, so transactions now flow in automatically and are categorized instead of landing as another pile of unlabeled activity. This leaves less manual cleanup for him, and less for Command to untangle later.
That’s the pattern Martin is chasing more broadly: as much of his financial stack as possible living in one place, so admin stops being something he has to think about at all. “I hate having so many different subscriptions and pieces of software to manage,” he says. With Books, that list is already shorter — fewer logins, one less thing to hand off to a teammate, and an interface he trusts, the same quality that drew him to Mercury's banking in the first place.
Martin describes Mercury Books in one word: clean. His advice to other founders doing bookkeeping themselves is just as direct: Lean into the agents. “Use Mercury Command on Books. If you're already banking with Mercury, there’s no reason to layer a different accounting platform on top of it,” he says.
