Читать книгу Startup CXO - Matt Blumberg - Страница 30

Outsourcing your bookkeeping can certainly work a lot of the time with the right partner and processes. But at some point, you will need to hire an internal team. At first, this will include a general accountant able to do it all, but eventually you will need to hire specific functional roles including Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable.

Here are some common roles to hire as you scale a startup:

 Controller. At a startup, the controller will manage the entire accounting team and processes, be the point person for all audits and compliance and tax, and generally be responsible for ensuring that the financials are accurate and timely. When the company is smaller, you can have someone a bit more junior who is able to grow with the company. If you are scaling rapidly and complexity is being added quickly to the accounting function, it is a good idea to find someone who has done it before, giving you a critical partner in cleanly scaling accounting.

 General accountant. This is often the first accounting hire. A person who can do it all in the early days, and especially keep an accurate and timely set of books is a good first hire. Ideally they will be able to keep the chart of accounts organized as the business grows and generally do a little bit of everything with the bookkeeping. It is usually helpful if this person has an accounting degree or some experience with an internal audit firm. They will be making a lot of small decisions early on that will end up being the team process for the next couple of years. So, the cleaner you can make it, the better!

 Accounts payable (AP). At some point, the volume of work paying vendors, employee expenses and other day‐to‐day clerical duties will become too much for the general accountant. The primary area to focus on for this role is proper timing of payments to vendors (not too early, not too late), accurate tagging of expenses to the proper accounts and departments, and effectively managing employee expense reports and expense attribution. This role may also help out with payroll and other reporting.

 Accounts receivable (AR). Similar to the AP role, there will be a point where it makes sense to hire someone internally to collect payments from customers. For startups, this person will typically be responsible for generating invoices, maintaining the AR records, dealing with the many, many ad‐hoc and custom invoices the team asks for, and of course, collections. An effective AR role can easily pay for themselves through quicker collections and lowering bad debt. Both the AP and AR roles can be effectively carried out by junior people as long as they have excellent self‐management skills.

As you scale, there are a few additional roles you'll want to add to the accounting team.

 Revenue controller. Some companies end up with complicated deals, invoicing, and revenue recognition. In these cases, it may make sense to consider a senior accountant whose primary responsibility is to review each transaction to ensure they are invoiced correctly and that the deferred revenue and revenue recognition schedules are accurate. This is typically a fairly complicated job so it is not something you'd hire a junior employee to do. You may never need this role as it is only really found in mature organizations with complicated deals.

 Transaction specialist. There could be a few different titles for this role, but essentially as you scale, there may be a role for accountants who help process and approve individual transactions. This could include ad‐hoc requests for changes to invoices, checking the data in the systems against agreements, and approvals for pricing and packaging requests. There are a lot of different elements in transactions and at some point it may make sense to have this role to keep the data timely and accurate.