The automators who needed automation: how QuicksortRx created financial clarity

"God forbid you get hit by a bus, Matt. But now I'll at least be able to project cash flow next month.”

Jonathan Yantis, CEO and co-founder of QuicksortRx, said this and shrugged, his tone half-joking, half-serious. His co-founder, Matt Hebbard, laughed, shaking his head.

It wasn’t just a joke between friends. Jonathan was pointing to a very real concern they had about their financial system—a system that, until very recently, had relied heavily on Matt and his spreadsheets.

Automating purchasing for hospitals

Before QuicksortRx, hospitals were stuck using spreadsheets to manage pharmacy purchasing and discover what was happening in the market. They were used to receiving reports months after a quarter closed, only to find out they’d overspent on a product or missed an important cost change that would impact their budget.

QuicksortRx changed that for good. It all started when Jonathan and Matt first met at a Python meet-up a few years ago.

Matt, a pharmacist at the time, was deep into spreadsheets working at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston. Matt found that evaluating the pharmaceutical market more frequently could save the hospital millions of dollars. At the scale at which the hospital operated, small but nimble changes could add up to a whole lot—but the manual analysis was brutal.

Jonathan, an expert in systems security and networking, was always automating things at MUSC, consistently moving on to the next big project. When he met Matt, something clicked.

They started working together, long hours blurring into each other. Before long, they had developed a system that tracked real-time changes in the pharmaceutical market, helping hospitals spot opportunities to decrease the costs of care with greater ease. It gave hospitals access to important information, automated complex processes, and helped them make smarter decisions—quickly.

QuicksortRx was born.

But while they were transforming pharmacy purchasing, their own financial system was stuck in the past.

Struggling with spreadsheets

As first-time entrepreneurs, Jonathan and Matt managed finance using spreadsheets. “QuicksortRx was not venture-backed, so all we needed at first was a simple cash-flow model. We were budgeting like a household,” Matt said. “Tracking the money coming in from customers, and calculating what was going out.”

For a while, that worked. Matt was the "Excel guy"— running the spreadsheet models for finance, and often had the most up-to-date numbers on hand. 

“Matt had an intuitive sense of our cash flow, but I didn’t. It was outside my sphere of control,” Jonathan said. To explore a new opportunity or understand a risk often meant hours of building in spreadsheets.

As the company grew, their decisions needed even greater levels of detail and accurate projections. "We had to start managing our cash like a hawk," Jonathan said. "Can we hire this new person? Can we spend more money there? Everything had to be modeled out manually."

“Every decision required a deep dive,” Matt said. “When would money come in? What could we risk? What could we afford to delay? It was exhausting.”

Jonathan, meanwhile, found himself getting increasingly anxious.

“When I felt nervous about cash flow, I’d go to Matt,” Jonathan said. “But he was busy, and so was I.” They couldn’t check the numbers without diving into spreadsheets and refreshing everything. "I'm sure we've missed out on some significant opportunities,” Matt said, ”because we’d say, ‘it's going to take a couple of weeks to figure this out.’” 

“I’d be sitting on a plane, with no internet, trying to figure out if we can hire someone or do something. But to get that answer, I’d have to do a bunch of busywork,” Jonathan said. They could only prioritize the financial decisions that worried them the most. “It was like finance was managed by anxiety.” 

This was turning into a serious problem.

Discovering Runway

One day, scrolling through posts on X, Jonathan heard about Runway. "The line that actually resonated with me was, ‘Finance is stuck in the 15th century,’" Jonathan said. “What we were doing for hospitals—bringing real-time analytics to outdated processes—Runway was offering companies like ours.”

Runway promised automation, clarity, and speed to decisions—all the things Jonathan and Matt needed, and the same things they were offering hospitals through their own software.

Matt was hesitant at first. "I was a tough sell on it. For one, I’m stingy. Two: this was something that I owned. I'm the Excel guy—I got this entire system up and running in the first place."

But the strain was showing. “We are growing fast, and we had to keep rebuilding our budgets and projections from scratch. It was too much,” Matt said.

They decided to give Runway a try.

Automating their own finances

"I set up our cash flow model just once, and now it works all the time," Matt said. No more manual updates. No more rebuilding from scratch for the next budget discussion.

"In Runway, we're integrated with Gusto and Salesforce—we don’t have to do manual entries or remember to adjust anything anymore. I love that," said Emily Cook, Head of Operations.

“We don’t have to keep updating charts or recreating reports,” Jonathan said. “The whole idea of not having to update things is just central to my mindset. Otherwise, things don’t get done right, mistakes get made, and things degrade. You want your numbers to be up-to-date and accurate and debuggable—like a program.”

Jonathan and Matt have started looking at their business differently. “How many hospitals can a pharmacist support? What size and spend? All these ratios and proportions help us validate decisions. And they take substantial time to do in spreadsheets.”

Decisions that once took days now happen almost instantly.

“Now, we can just look at our data and say something like, ‘All our pharmacists have roughly the same number of hospitals with the same amount of ARR tied to them at peak. If we continue to grow at this rate, we’ll need to hire again around X date,’” Matt said. “We only hire the best folks, and it can take months to find the right person, so it helps to know things well in advance.”

What financial clarity feels like

The financial anxiety that had hung over them has also dissipated.

Jonathan doesn't have to wait for Matt to update a spreadsheet anymore. The numbers are always there, always up-to-date, and always accessible.

That means Matt can focus on more important things. “Runway got me out of the spreadsheet update loop, so I can think about how we’re going to run our business—what parts need to scale and where should we focus next. The irony that this is exactly the same relief we give the hospitals we help is not lost on me a bit.”

“I know the compounding value of Runway over time will be tremendous, especially as we scale,“ Jonathan said. “In an instant, I can see how we’re doing today, keep tabs on a few key metrics that stay up to date. I won't blow up my investments or board presentations if someone leaves or can’t join that week. It puts the business in a stronger position from a financial perspective because all that knowledge stays; it doesn't go away or require special expertise.”

That’s when Jonathan looked over at Matt and said, “God forbid you get hit by a bus, Matt. But now I'll be able to at least project cash flow next month. I'll have a lot of problems, but at least this I can manage.”

“We should have done this sooner,” he said.

Matt nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We should have.”

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