Insights
Insights & resources.
What we see across $15M–$80M B2B finance functions — the patterns, the costs, and the fixes.
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Will Your Books Survive a Raise?
A five-part guide to diligence-readiness — the order investors actually work through your financials, why revenue recognition breaks most SaaS diligence, where the MRR/ARR waterfall reveals the gap between your deck and your books, how accruals and cutoff determine whether your margin is real, and what it takes to stay diligence-grade every month rather than…
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Running Finance for a 3–5 Person Startup (Without a Finance Team)
A five-part guide to running finance at a 3–5 person startup without a dedicated finance team — from what flying blind actually costs, to building a 13-week cash flow model, to the four numbers that predict survival, to reading that model for exactly when to raise, cut, or hire, and finally, knowing when the system…
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Outsourced Bookkeeping for Startups: When to Start
Key takeaways A seed-stage founder forwarded us a QuickBooks file the Tuesday before her Series A diligence opened. Fourteen months of revenue sat in one “income” bucket. Contractor payments and a co-founder’s reimbursed flights ran through the same card. Deferred revenue from annual contracts was booked as cash the day it landed. The numbers were…
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What a Fractional CFO Actually Does in Month One
Key takeaways A services owner forwarded us a bank screenshot the week we started: $214,000, which felt like comfort. By day nine we had reconstructed his actual position. A $90,000 client prepayment had landed early, two contractor invoices sat unentered, and payroll plus a quarterly tax payment were due inside eleven days. His real cushion…
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What a Controller Catches That a Bookkeeper Can’t
Key takeaways A 12-person agency invoiced a client $90,000 in December for a project that finished in February. Cash arrived before year-end, so the bookkeeper booked it as December revenue. The books balanced. The bank reconciled. Nothing looked wrong. But December’s profit was overstated by $90,000. The next year started in a hole. When a…
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When ‘Good Enough’ Bookkeeping Starts Costing You
Key takeaways A founder we met had a P&L showing a $42,000 profit for the quarter. The bank wanted accrual financials before extending a line. When we re-cut the same QuickBooks Online file on an accrual basis, that profit became an $18,000 loss. Nothing was late. Every account reconciled. The books were “done,” and also…
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Why a Monthly Close Beats Waiting for Your Year-End CPA
Key takeaways A founder once handed our team a clean-looking P&L in March and asked why the bank account felt tighter than the statement said. The books had not been closed since the prior December. Fifteen months of activity sat in a shoebox of bank feeds and unreconciled invoices, and the number on the page…
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Should Your CPA Firm White-Label Its Tax Prep?
Key takeaways In the second week of March, a four-partner firm counts 60 unstarted 1040s against a calendar with 31 days remaining. Two partners are preparing returns they should be reviewing, while a third drafts an extension list for clients the firm has filed for nine years running. That scenario recurs across the profession every…
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Are You Leaving R&D Tax Credits on the Table?
Key takeaways A seed-stage founder spent roughly $1.1M on engineering payroll last year, building a product that had never billed a customer. He assumed tax credits were for profitable companies and skipped the question. They are not. His company qualified to turn a chunk of that R&D spend into a payroll-tax refund worth tens of…