Accounting Solution for Startup Companies
The way we do startup companies (goal is one per quarter), we try to cut as many costs as possible. Most of our startups are virtual (no physical office) at first. When we get enough momentum, we get office space. Most of our work comes initially from contract employees. Later, we hire people full-time.For accounting, we usually use Quickbooks. But there are some drawbacks for startups to the otherwise wonderful small business accounting package.
If you are a small virtual company, with contractors developing your product and web site, then you probably don’t need to hire an accountant yet. That comes much later. So you could hire a bookkeeper, but you may be too small for that.
You can purchase Quickbooks for between $100 and $300. But it can only reside on one computer. Multiple people can’t access it, unless you’re on a local area network. And when you do hire a full-time accountant, unless you have a network by then, you’ll no longer have much visibility into your books. You can go from being hands on to being out of the loop overnight.
Today I think I found a great solution. I decided to try out Quickbooks Online Edition for iCount.com, one of our very promising companies. Within 10 minutes I had configured the company, its major accounts, and entered in our transactions for the last few months. It was incredibly easy.
For only $19.95 per month up to 3 users can access the Online Edition. This means that we can divide up some of the bookkeeping responsibilities among our team members. Plus, we can hire an accountant to oversee our books. Any of us can access our financial reports and customer data from any computer with internet access.
I guess Quickbooks Online Edition has been around for more than 1 year; their official blog says they had over 22,000 subscribed companies a few months back. That seems remarkably low for such a great service.
I’m totally sold.
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