Pls Fix: The Two Most Feared Words in Finance
"Pls fix" — two words, no explanation, maximum dread. Macabacus built an entire product around preventing that moment. It says a lot about the industry it serves.
Somewhere right now, a second-year analyst is getting a deck handed back with two words written on it: pls fix. No elaboration. No guidance. Just the quiet devastation of knowing you have to figure out what's wrong, fix it, and do it fast enough that nobody notices the whole thing happened.
Deck Check, a feature from Macabacus, is explicitly designed to prevent this. One click, whole deck, scanned for formatting errors, branding inconsistencies, and layout problems before they get anywhere near your MD's inbox. The pitch is blunt and accurate: find the errors before your MD does.
What I find interesting here isn't the tool itself — it's what the tool reveals about the ambient terror structuring an entire industry. Investment banking runs on pitchbooks. Pitchbooks are judged, partly, on whether the font sizes are consistent on slide 47. This is a real thing that real adults spend real hours worrying about. Macabacus has built an entire suite of software — Excel-to-PowerPoint linking, dynamic agendas, tombstone automation, brand-compliant charting — on the foundation of that anxiety.
The product naming is doing some heavy lifting, too. Deck Check. Corporate Dictionary. MasterShapes. This is the vocabulary of an industry that has ritualized precision as a proxy for rigor. The deck doesn't just need to be right — it needs to be demonstrably, verifiably, audit-trail-ably right, in a format that signals you belong to the culture that produced it.
Whether that's insane or perfectly rational probably depends on how many pitchbooks you've made. Either way, Macabacus is there, catching your orphaned bullets before the senior partner does.