Financial services tasks for running a SaaS company
I'm interesting in knowing what people feel are the most challenging and/or least supported financial services tasks when it comes to running a SaaS business.
- What was it that you specifically struggled with?
- how did you overcome this? (product? hack? outsource?)
Themes include by not limited to payments, banking, accounting, taxes, payroll, working capital, procurement, fundraising, reporting, analysis, projections, etc
Context: My first attempt at creating a product was for 'Beard Oil'. I really wanted to make the beard oil and I was curious about company creation and setting up a corporate bank account, payment processing etc.
That curiosity quickly turned to friction and frustration. What should be the equivalent of people cheering you along, like the closing few hundred meters of a marathon, is more like one indifferent group after another adding confusion, friction and overhead to manage.
Financial service tasks:
a) Registering a Co. had to be done on paper in person, expensive.
b) Making changes to the co., adding people etc - also had to be done on paper, was confusing and slow - and it wasn't really clear if my understanding of the state of the company was the same as the government's. Now that we're so used to having accounts and account settings - this seems missing from this process.
Taxes - It was going to cost more in service fees to file taxes than to let the company die. Following the rules shouldn't be so fractioned and complicated. The incentives seem to be miss-aligned.
Beard Oil (Hair and Skin Serum)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RR73pg0DkAom_a4SxtAxbJBnauyEl1fn/view?usp=sharing
I work in the financial accounting field, and most of the time, I have encountered problems with taxes and transfers. It often happens that a longer transfer of money from one customer to another takes longer than it normally should. Also, the company at work has encountered some challenges related to taxes, which seemed not to be argued and were growing more and more. We called https://barkersprocurement.com/services/cost-transformation/ cost reduction to stop the company's losses.
Marketplaces have a surprisingly large amount of financial issues. It's not exactly what you're asking for, but sending many small transactions to people all over the world is a pretty complex thing. Collecting international banking info as well. Pretty much everything that is not covered by Stripe Connect.