5 months into a running a startup, the little things I learned

http://www.cucumbertown.com/craft/5-months-into-a-running-a-startup-the-little-things-i-learned/

by playhard • 13 years ago

44 12 13 years ago

kfk• 13 years ago

Say you have a financial controller (which looks at both accounting and financial performance) in front of you, what kind of questions would you like to ask? What kind of training would you like to get?

aj_ycombinator3• 13 years ago

I think most important things would be: 1. Understanding double-entry accounting 2. Passing entries for liabilities and later squaring off them against payment from bank (e.g. credit card, deferred taxes) 3. Managing all the hosting services and other SaaS tools monthly payments as an expense item 4. Understanding how to account for equity

sgt• 13 years ago

GNUcash though ? I used that for a while and it was just so frustrating to work with. Even creating a custom invoice was a hassle. That application needs to be replaced by a cloud hosted app for simple invoicing.

Cherian3• 13 years ago

Lack of alternatives. GnuCash is frustrating to work on mac.

abhimir• 13 years ago

An Indian startup here looking to register a C corp soon. How have you setup the two entities? Does the US corp get all the revenues, and pay the Indian company a development fee for the product? Which company pays the salary, US or Indian? Anything else to keep in mind while going down this route?

aj_ycombinator3• 13 years ago

Well, we are not using it for any invoicing but just maintaining our records. The year end reporting to the CPA was a cakewalk this time compared to all the head breaking we went through pouring over Excel entries, bank account statements etc last year. There are other alternatives but GNUCash works well for our needs.

cbhl• 13 years ago

Do you ever see yourself transitioning to a closed-source or SaaS accounting package, like Wave Accounting or QuickBooks Online? If so, why? If not, why not?

levosmetalo• 13 years ago

That already exsist, in open source form. Just use hledger, which offers hledger-web, put in online behind a nginx and you are done.

It uses ledger compatible transaction files which can you edit and inspect manually if needed, offers a bunch of additional functionality, and is a joy to use, bot the web and command line version.

EasyJoe• 13 years ago

Might I suggest a new home page for cucumbertown? It's extremely well done - very pretty, a lot of fun things happening.

It's also far too busy. I couldn't tell what I was supposed to see. Too many things moving and drawing my eyes away from actually reading. Too much scrolling. I closed it without trying to "come on in" even though I am likely in your target market.

It's a cool showcase of what you can do with HTML. Not so good for marketing a product.

Cherian3• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. We are on our way to fixing this.

5 months into a running a startup, the little things I learned

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