Channelling my frustration into building something.

TL;DR - My frustration with accounting as an early stage bootstrapper in SaaS.

Whether you are in the idea stage, bootstrapping or your startup is funded, I believe you can relate to this post!

I am writing this post because I have experienced challenges relating to accounting admin as a co-founder of previous startups and would like to share what I wish existed back then.

Disclaimer: I am currently working on a startup trying solve this problem. I want to give free accounting advice as a gesture of giving back to this community because I don’t want founders to waste as much time as we did. Of course, if you help beta test our product, that would be much appreciated!

Problem: Accounting sucks and dealing with it is frustrating especially when I lack time and resources.

In my previous startups, it started off as a side project. Then it got serious which is usually a great sign. I wanted to focus purely on marketing, sales automation, lead generation and shipping product. But to legitimise the idea, we had to incorporate. I live in Hong Kong where Stripe Atlas don’t work so we sent documents with a professional services company and the incorporation was not the best experience but not the worst. I wish Stripe Atlas existed in Hong Kong.

Now after incorporation, with your business being official, it’s an awesome feeling but there are more responsibilities, especially admin + operational tasks you normally don’t have to deal with.

Even though, finding PMF, writing blogs and working on SEO is priority, I knew we should set up a proper system to account for our revenue and expenses, especially if we want to set ourselves up for success to fundraise, but where should I start? I can’t afford an accountant because they have such a high floor pricing. After some research, I downloaded Xero hopefully this is the right software that could resolve my fear of accounting. It wasn’t.

I swear Xero is built for accountants and not friendly towards founders with little to no accounting knowledge back then. Over provisioned with features and not SaaS friendly, one thing they got right though is their API marketplace community, more and more SaaS can be plugged in. But setting up each API can be a nightmare (that’s another problem).

Anyways, it was after hours of research, test and trial, that we found a system and workflow that works for us. I know marketing + lead generation startups are cool but wish someone started a non sexy startup in the accounting space that could guide us from moment of incorporation to offering accounting advice before charging us anything (or only charging as we ramp up revenue). There simply wasn’t a place to discuss the nuanced challenges we faced, how shall we deal with this receipt, how can I break down my Stripe charges, every accounting website we contacted sent us a quote for a full range of services and I just felt like the industry is still quite traditional and not equipped to serve SaaS founders. We like it flexible and they should speak our language.

I understand there are great SaaS like Stripe/Paddle/Chargebee where there’s tons of transactional data but how can we link all these applications together with the accounting software, took hours to set this up properly. Also with all your email receipts and invoices for SaaS you subscribe to, what’s the most efficient way to process them.

Even with newer services like Pilot or Bench in the US, I feel they are quite overpriced with a high floor pricing to enter. There must be something more affordable, flexible and niche towards our community.

Ok if you have made it this far, then maybe you can resonate with my problem experienced in the past.

I have channelled this frustration from this problem into trying to build something that would serve super early stage founders better after you incorporate and not be researching for hours on how to deal with accounting. Obviously another aspect is making this affordable and not adopt a traditional CPA approach.

There must be a better way of doing accounting, maybe call it admin, and I am still trying to figure out what that means.

If you need any kind of accounting advice, please feel free to msg me on Twitter @haywoodshum as I understand each situation might be personal.

Again if you have made it this far, have you experienced any parts of my story above? Or was it actually a pleasant experience for you?

Interested in your stories!

Have a great weekend!