After beating cancer, Marty Thomas, a software engineer, didn’t want to go back to business as usual. He and his wife set out on a new mission: to grow and distribute clean, local food. “We made it our mission to try and use technology to get clean food to as many people as possible," he said. That vision became Kakadoodle: part working farm, part online farmers market, delivering locally-produced food directly to consumers.
But as their ambitions scaled, so did the complexity of the business. Marty wasn’t just managing chickens and pastured eggs; he was also coordinating dozens of producers, tracking orders, and handling growing financial operations. For a software developer with high expectations for user experience, the tools supporting this growth needed to be as sophisticated as the business itself. QuickBooks wasn't cutting it. "I really didn't like working with it," said Thomas. "The UI was such a frustrating experience for me. It was incredibly clunky.”
Problem: "Triple the cost"
"As a software guy, I am a sucker for a good UI," he said. "Working through QuickBooks was just painful for me."
The real crisis came when Kakadoodle's growth demanded better financial organization. The business essentially operates as two separate enterprises: the egg farm and the online marketplace.
In QuickBooks, tracking multiple enterprises requires the "classes" feature, which came with a steep price increase. "It took what we were paying for QuickBooks and tripled that. It was incredibly more expensive to do enterprise tracking," Thomas said.
Beyond the cost, the learning curve was also overwhelming. "I already didn't like working in QuickBooks and then this made it even worse. I was suddenly paying more money for this thing and trying to wrap my head around how classes works."
The result was a system Thomas avoided using for actual business insights. "I treated QuickBooks like a necessary tool for my accountant to be able to pay the taxes," he said. "I would not look at P&Ls. I would not look at balance sheets. Instead, I would look at my bank account as my source of truth."
Solution: "Incredibly intuitive"
When Thomas discovered Ambrook, he decided to give it a try. The difference was immediate and dramatic.
"I had in my brain an idea of what the ideal Quickbooks classes should look and operate like. By the time I got to Ambrook, it was like I found exactly that. I thought immediately: this is incredibly intuitive," he said. "I understood what it was and how I was looking at things. The interface is obviously brilliant and beautiful."
The onboarding process aligned perfectly with Thomas's software philosophy. "If I'm required to talk to a salesperson before I start using the software, I'm out. The software should be intuitive enough for me just to dive in and start working on it without having anybody else tell me how I'm supposed to be using it. And that's the way that Ambrook is set up."
When inevitable setup mistakes occurred, Ambrook's support impressed him further. "I had a bank pulling in incorrectly, which made a little bit of a mess. But Ambrook support came in and reworked the database to fix my mistake," Thomas said. The integrated chat support became "the icing on top of the cake," allowing for users to provide instant feedback and receive real-time support, far more effectively than QuickBooks' ticket system.
Results: "Closer to the truth"
The transformation in Thomas's relationship with his business finances was remarkable. "I would say that before, when I was in QuickBooks, I hated looking at the numbers," he said. "But now I actually enjoy looking at my numbers because of the Ambrook interface and how intuitive it is. Like, I have this baseline comfort level with Ambrook. I never had that with QuickBooks."
With Ambrook, Thomas has positioned himself to make data-driven decisions about Kakadoodle's future. "Now I have someplace to go that is closer to the truth financially and lets me look at these entities in a way that allows me to make those decisions. That's there in Ambrook."
Looking forward: "Beyond chickens"
Kakadoodle is recovering from a challenging year that included losing their flock to bird flu and cuts to government food programs. But Thomas is planning ambitious growth: adding multiple livestock species to the farm, expanding their successful on-farm retail operation, and continuing to grow their online marketplace.
"The enterprises are going to become more important," Thomas said. "We're going to have on-farm sales, we're going to go beyond chickens on the farming side, we're going to have multiple different enterprises that we'll need to kind of keep track of independently of one another."
With Ambrook's enterprise tracking capabilities, Thomas feels equipped to manage this complexity while maintaining the financial clarity that eluded him with QuickBooks. He's even eager to consolidate further: "When you guys roll out payroll, then I can be completely done with QuickBooks. We'll be customer number one."
Conclusion
"I really appreciate what you guys are doing," Thomas reflected. For a software professional who understands good user experience, Ambrook delivered what QuickBooks couldn't: intuitive design, reasonable pricing for advanced features, and the agricultural focus that makes the complexities of farm businesses manageable.
Best of all Thomas is no longer avoiding his financials or relying solely on his bank balance for business insights. He's building a sustainable food system with the financial clarity to back every decision, and genuinely enjoying the process of getting to know his numbers.