Читать книгу Startup CXO - Matt Blumberg - Страница 27

During the startup journey, establishing a scalable accounting back office will pay dividends later on. It's a lot easier to create an accounting back office early and modify it as you grow than find yourself scrambling to put something together under a tight deadline. An alternative to doing all the work yourself is to outsource some standard tasks, and many firms outsource bookkeeping, for example, but keep other activities in‐house. The benefit of this plan is that (1) you will not need to focus on basic vendor payments, expense logging, and revenue recognition, and (2) the third‐party company will typically set up a default chart of accounts and expense tagging approach that makes the most sense for your type of business. But there are few areas you want to keep an eye on even in the early days.

Early on, you will likely use a lightweight accounting system, especially if you're using a third‐party bookkeeper. During the onboarding of the bookkeeper, you will want to cover a few areas, most notably the chart of accounts. Review the chart of accounts to make sure you have the appropriate detail in them in order to do your required financial reporting. A useful process is to lay out what you would like your income statement and balance sheet to look like and ask yourself what questions you will need to answer. For example, how will revenue need to be broken out? Each journal entry needs proper support ideally attached to the entry in the system, or stored in a systematic way. Account reconciliations need to be performed regularly and reviewed, and documented. Those two simple things will make the audit so much easier so you're not scrambling to figure out “wait, why did we book this, what does this tie to?” And then from there you can get more advanced on what the audits/diligences need. You'll want to make sure you have accounted for things like subscription revenue, setup revenue, service revenue, transaction revenue, and any other revenue streams you might have. As the business scales, the analysis will require that sort of segmentation of the economics. On the cost side you may want to consider how to break out accounts like Marketing which might have advertising, brand, and digital components you'd like to track separately. Other areas to think about might include legal costs, and you could track transactions, intellectual property, contracts, or litigation. On the balance sheet, I'd suggest keeping it simple early on but make sure you have enough detail on your more important accounts.

Once you have a good sense of the accounts, you'll next need to consider the dimensions. For example, do you want to have a dimension for product and region? It is helpful to have the dimensions thought out as these will enable you to keep a scalable chart of accounts as you add new products to the business.

A second thing to organize within operational accounting are system integrations and even the earliest setups will need some integration with their financial system. The most common system integrations that startups will have to deal with are travel and expense (T&E) software and billing software. It is worth spending some time early on making the integrations work as it will save time with the accounting close as well as give you accurate and timely information. I'd also suggest creating custom tags in your expense software that match up with your accounting system and chart of accounts. Also, if you are going to be charging sales tax, it's super helpful to integrate it early on with other systems.

Ah … sales tax. Fun, fun, fun. Sales taxes are a complicated challenge and they become more challenging the longer you ignore them or put them off. Many companies, including ones I have been involved in, ignored the sales tax issue until the company became “bigger” because small companies really don't hit state radar until $100k or so in revenues as they trigger the amount in the Wayfair sales tax ruling. But if you do put it off, it can become a huge and expensive problem. States have become more aggressive as remote work has become more prevalent and recent court decisions mean that you have to pay sales tax in more states than ever before. Currently, if you are doing more than $100k (or 200 transactions) with a state, you will need to address sales taxes in that state. Some businesses may not have to pay sales tax, but again, states are becoming increasingly aggressive in their audits. One of the best things you can do is work with a technology partner to collect and submit sales taxes and integrate everything in your financial systems.

One task that you'll do repeatedly—monthly at a minimum—is the accounting close. Having an organized monthly accounting close is an effective way to ensure you are working well with your partner or internal accounting team. Every company has a different close process but most efficient ones share a few things. First, create an accounting close checklist, something that's repeatable and that has each task and the responsible party that can be checked off as complete when done. You can set up a simple spreadsheet or you can also use a project management tool or accounting close software to help provide more information. As your company scales, it is helpful to move to a software solution which will ensure your visibility and accountability during the process as you grow. I have found this to be one of the easiest quick wins to put in place as you scale.

Another item to include in your operational accounting system related to the close is a reasonable time goal each month. Of course, your goal will depend on resources, business requirements, and complexity, but it's always helpful to establish a goal. Say your goal is five business days. The organization knows that the Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) reports will not be done until after that five‐day period so this provides a bit of cover to your team. It also gives the team (or your partner) knowledge that if they're going to miss that deadline and need more time, they'll have to communicate with you to avoid surprises.

You may very well get “surprises” from time to time but, especially around the close tasks, you can manage that by creating effective lines of communication and by understanding the dependencies of your company. The accounting team will be dependent on a number of things in order to have an effective close, ranging from accrual information for services used by your company where you haven't received an invoice, to timely expense reports or sales closes. You may have to send reminder emails to others in your company or, better yet, have them involved in the actual closing checklist.