Tactic

Tactic is a software company that helps businesses account for cryptocurrency holdings and on-chain activity. Its product aggregates data from wallets, blockchains, centralized exchanges and self-custody solutions such as Gnosis Safe to give finance teams a consolidated treasury view of balances and transactions. The software automatically categorizes transactions and applies accounting logic, including USD gain/loss calculation and identification of taxable events, producing a crypto sub-ledger that accountants can reconcile against conventional accounting platforms.

The company positions itself as a translation layer rather than a replacement for existing finance tooling: founder and CEO Ann Jaskiw has said Tactic deliberately pushes normalized on-chain data into software accountants already use, such as QuickBooks, instead of asking finance teams to retrain on a new general ledger. Tactic has said decentralized finance transactions are the hardest case it addresses, since a single smart-contract interaction can generate hundreds of nested transactions that must be broken out for accounting purposes. It has worked with accounting firms to interpret guidance for DeFi-specific activity such as staking, NFT minting and airdrops, and added support for the Polygon layer-two network because of its use in the NFT market.

Founding story

Ann Jaskiw launched Tactic in 2021 while working on a different crypto project. In conversations with founders in the space she found they were tracking crypto finances in spreadsheets, struggling to close their books monthly and to remain compliant with accounting principles, and that existing accounting software was not built to handle crypto transactions. She concluded the recurring question finance leaders could not answer was simply where the money had gone at the end of a quarter.

Business model

Tactic sells accounting and treasury software to companies that transact on-chain. Sources do not describe pricing or contract structure.

Traction

Tactic had signed up dozens of customers before its May 2022 seed announcement and declined to give an updated count in September 2022. Named customer Royal, the a16z-backed music startup co-founded by Justin Blau, reported via its head of finance that Tactic saved an average of 30 hours per month of manual calculation and updating.

Latest developments

Following the September 2022 raise, Tactic said it planned to cautiously expand its 12-person team, particularly in engineering and product, and to build deeper analytics and smarter categorization workflows while pursuing a one-stop-shop position for corporate crypto accounting.