Startup Finance

For me, finance was one of the areas that initially intimidated me about starting my own business.

It turns out, there are just a few basic tools you need.

• QuickBooks Online - We’ve had a number of accountants. Don’t let them talk you into the enterprise desktop version. Use this for tracking everything and sync it to your actual accounts.
• We use JustWorks as a PEO. This allows us to seamlessly ensure that our employee and contractor taxes get withheld.
• DryRun - Useful for modeling cash flow.
• Excel / Google Sheets - Turns out spreadsheets are where most of the interesting things happen. Use these to create models, test scenarios, etc.
• Our bank has a “dropbox” service that we can have checks sent to that will automatically get deposited. This is handy. Not free … but handy.

Things To Learn Or Pay Attention To

1. Learn to read a budget. (Corallary: Learn to write a budget)
2. Follow AR. Stay involved in invoicing.
3. Develop processes for everything related to finance.
4. Graph cash flow.
5. Understand costs.