The first program, still running

The company

Sourcetoad is a custom software company in Tampa, Florida, founded in 2008, with a team of more than fifty. It has been named a Best Place to Work by the Tampa Bay Business Journal five times in the last eight years, every year from 2020 through 2024. In January 2026 it joined Thompson Holdings, an employee-owned company.

Ask Sourcetoad what the awards come down to and the answer is culture. A program that never misses a birthday is one of the ways that culture shows up on a calendar.

The problem

Sourcetoad always marked birthdays and work anniversaries. When the company was small, that was easy. Everyone knew the dates, and someone always had a card. Growth changed the arithmetic: more people, more dates, some of the team remote, and the same handful of leaders holding all of it in their heads.

The moments never stopped mattering. They started slipping. A birthday would surface at ten in the morning and a leader would step out of a meeting to drive to the Publix down the road for a cake. A work anniversary would be remembered the day before, and someone would scramble for a gift. Nobody forgot because they did not care. Life gets in the way of good intentions, and a calendar reminder is not a system.

Before

A spreadsheet of dates that one person kept. A leader who noticed, or did not. A cake run in the middle of the workday, a last-minute gift, a card written in the car. It worked, mostly, and every time it worked it cost someone an afternoon.

Why Thankscrate

Sourcetoad builds software for a living, so it did what it is good at. In 2022 the team wrote a tool for its own people: read the dates, plan the gift ahead of time, ask for a personal note, and ship a crate with a printed card so it arrives on the day. No more cake runs. That tool became Thankscrate. Thankscrate later acquired the foundation and rebuilt it into the platform on this site, and Sourcetoad has used it every day since, which makes it the customer with the longest record of what the program does over years, not months.

What was set up

• The team was added from a roster, no payroll connection needed.
• Two occasions: birthdays and work anniversaries, for everyone.
• One gift tier for every occasion, so every person gets the same standard.
• Physical Thankscrates, sent ahead of the day so they arrive on it.
• A personal message on every card, with the writing assistant on for the people who want a first draft.

How it runs

Every night Thankscrate looks ahead sixty days, creates the upcoming occasions, and asks for a message. About two weeks out it places the order and charges the card on file at the gift’s real cost. The Thankscrate ships with the printed card. The person who used to run the spreadsheet now approves messages and reads the history.

What the recipient gets

A Thankscrate and a card with a note from someone who knows them. The card is the part people keep. As Deborah Neff, VP Operations, put it: the program keeps the personal feeling of a custom card and takes away all the work of shipping gifts to team members.

The record

Since June 2022 the program has delivered more than 170 gifts to Sourcetoad’s people, roughly half for birthdays and half for work anniversaries, and the whole team is on it. Four years in, nobody keeps the spreadsheet.

What is next

Sourcetoad joined Thompson Holdings in January 2026. The program kept running through the change. Greg Ross-Munro and Stephanie Hiday talk about what an acquisition does to a culture, and what stayed the same, on the podcast episode below.