

Offer HN: We do your accounting, You help us prove startup concept - ecommercematt

I'm in the process of researching a startup opportunity focusing on accounting with a CPA friend of mine. Specifically, the startup we're thinking of launching would produce monthly financial statements (P&#38;L, Cashflow, Balance Sheet).<p>What we're offering here is to produce the above listed financial statements for a few startups/small businesses (USA only, sorry) from the Hacker News community for free for a month (or more if it seems worthwhile), to test the process we've developed. The basic premise of the startup is to save small businesses the trouble of using Quickbooks or similar applications, and to enable them to upload a (hopefully pretty simple) list of documents from which accurate, third-party, objective financial statements are produced. In a sense what we're considering is similar to tripit.com, except the information will be uploaded via the web instead of forwarded by email, and we'll produce financial reports, not trip itineraries.<p>We know that financial information is sensitive and confidential, and we will treat it accordingly. Fortunately, there is a CPA on board to ensure that all rules, regs, and best practices are followed. Nonetheless, since this is such a sensitive matter, we'd like to request some time to talk with whoever might take us up on this offer to discuss confidentiality and security issues before any information exchange takes place. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them here, and you can look up my personal email address in my HN profile. Thanks!
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swombat
A month seems a bit short.

If people are going to trust their accounting to you to provide you with test
users, I think you should at least provide the first 10 or 20 test clients
with a free service for a year. Changing accountant is a big deal and so "one
month free" is not much at all.

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ecommercematt
Good point. Changing accountants is a big deal. In fact, one of the goals of
this potential startup is to make it a much smaller deal. Nonetheless, we're
not necessarily looking for someone to change their accountant with this
exercise. What we want to do is test our process with some startups, and in
return, we'll provide them with a new (and hopefully valuable) perspective on
their finances.

That being said, we're open to any ideas, and when we speak with the startups
we might be doing this for, we'd be happy to discuss any possible arrangements
in terms of duration, etc.

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pbhj
That small list of docs seems to be the key - am I scanning them or entering
data from them? If I have to type in any bank info, add invoice data, add
petty-cash data, etc. ... then it seems I'm better using a local solution with
potentially better security?

Programs like Quickbooks produce P&L, etc., at the touch of a button. It's the
information input that sucks IMO.

[I'm a small business director using SAGE Accounts (UK)]

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ecommercematt
Yes, the small list of docs is the key. We're asking for statements, etc., not
data entry on your part.

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oomkiller
This sounds like a really cool idea, and would be very useful to the startup
culture. You'll have to remember though, startups don't always have lots of
money to spend on services, so they usually just do it themselves (if
horribly). You'll also have to have acceptable quality, even for a low price.

Hope it works out, this could revolutionize accounting for small business, not
just startups.

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horatio
This is a hard problem, but I really would love an accounting service more
like Mint for a business. I had dozens of accounts that Mint read and loaded
fine. If you had the ability to get that sort of info and electronically
handle the majority of the firm's accounting, that's the approach I'd like to
see.

I don't like sending documents-- the vast majority of ours are digitally
accessible now.

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ecommercematt
True dat. You're describing what we're looking to work towards. Manual
statement uploads are still a lot easier than manual line-by-line
transcription. We're able to accept any format (natively digital or scanned),
though, which means that very little effort is required on your part.

