
Show HN: Pilot: Bookkeeping for startups, using humans and software - wdaher
https://pilot.com
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wdaher
Hi HN!

Pilot is a bookkeeping company that specializes in startup companies. We
started it because we really struggled to find a good bookkeeping solution in
our previous startups (Ksplice and Zulip).

Amazingly, the state of the world of bookkeeping has largely been unchanged
for the past 20 years: you hire a bookkeeper who buys a copy of QuickBooks and
does a ton of clicking around and hand-entering to bring everything up-to-date
every month.

Which is a little crazy because the underlying data is quite structured
(dates, amounts, memos), and 90% of the work is effectively “Execute well-
defined rule X on data Y”. The first-principles solution to this problem would
definitely not be “Hire a person, hope all the rules fit in their head, and
make them click a lot”— it would be software.

But our feeling was: people don’t want more bookkeeping software—they’d rather
not worry about bookkeeping at all. So we started Pilot: a bookkeeping
_service_ powered by our expert team of (human) bookkeepers in San Francisco,
who, under the hood, use a bunch of software we’ve written to automate the
most tedious, error-prone parts of the work. Every month, we deliver up-to-
date accrual basis books for you, in QuickBooks Online.

We’re currently doing the books for a bunch of startup companies (ranging from
pre-seed all the way to Series B), including 30+ YC companies, but we're just
now starting to tell the story more broadly.

We’d love to get your feedback! I’ll be around all day watching this thread,
or you can just shoot me an email (waseem@pilot.com).

~~~
ahazred8ta
If you're casting a broad net, speak to the moderators on
[https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/](https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/) \- they have a
steady supply of early-stage managed service providers asking for msp-aware
business logic and money handling.

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dzink
Do you guys have an ability to provide advice about what startups at early
stages need to do for book keeping, filings, etc? You seem to be more
affordable than competitors for early stages, so you would also deal with less
experienced founders who are graduating from TurboTax into something that
handles an ever-increasing load, done with dubious thoroughness at start. My
biggest challenge is getting proper advice about everything needs to be done
and making sure I don't miss something. Provide resources on that, maybe via
SEO (YC for bookkeeping and compliance for early stage founders) and you'd
have a never ending stream of leads.

~~~
wdaher
I definitely like the idea of providing some good, clear writeups about "You
have a company--now what?".

There's some care needed—we're a bookkeeping firm, so we can't give
accounting/tax/legal advice, but there's a lot we _can_ do to help (and we can
always connect you with e.g. a tax prep firm we know and trust for the stuff
we can't do ourselves.)

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aerodog
This is a brilliant startup idea. Highly needed. Nice to see the "Ksplice
Mafia" still at it.

