

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

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EasyJoe
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.

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

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sgt
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.

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aj_ycombinator
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.

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cbhl
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?

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aj_ycombinator
Of course we would grow out of GNUCash some day. I have not explored yet on
what solutions we may end up looking at though. Since we are not an e-commerce
outfit, we can live for some more time with basic tools just recording our
expenses. The day when we start issuing invoices (or if we had to procure
inventory to convert to saleable goods), we would need something other than
GNUCash.

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kfk
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?

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aj_ycombinator
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

