Insights
Insights & resources.
What we see across $15M–$80M B2B finance functions — the patterns, the costs, and the fixes.
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What Puzzle Does — and What It Doesn’t
Key takeaways A seed-stage founder we work with opened Puzzle one Tuesday and saw a clean dashboard: $2.1M cash, $140K net burn, runway in the green. Three days later his lead investor asked how he was recognizing a $480K annual prepay that had landed that month. The software had booked the cash correctly and flagged…
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The Tampa Small-Business Owner’s Time Tax
Key takeaways A South Tampa shop owner closes the register at 7 p.m., then opens QuickBooks at 9. Friday is payroll. The bank feed has 60 uncategorized transactions, two checks have not cleared, and the sales-tax filing is due in four days. By 11:30 the books still do not balance, and the real cost is…
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The Hidden Cost of Running QuickBooks Behind
Key takeaways The median small business in America holds 27 days of cash. That figure comes from JPMorgan Chase Institute, which read 470 million transactions across 597,000 firms. Run that 27-day margin while your QuickBooks file is three months stale, and you are making payroll calls, pricing calls, and hiring calls against numbers that describe…
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Getting Ready for Your First Audit: A Founder’s Checklist
Key takeaways The word arrives attached to good news. You closed a priced round and the new investor wants audited statements as a condition of the wire. Or a lender made an audit a covenant on the facility. The reaction is the same: a quiet worry about whether the books survive someone reading them line…
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How White-Label Bookkeeping Margins Work for Your Firm
Key takeaways A firm bills a client $2,200 a month for managed books in QuickBooks Online and pays a white-label partner $900 to produce them. On paper, that is a 59% gross margin. Most partners never run that division. They mark up by instinct, send the invoice, and never revisit the number. In the firm…
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Equity, Cap Tables, and Stock-Comp Accounting: What Founders Miss
Key takeaways A founder forwarded us a term sheet last spring with a note that read, in full, “diligence should be quick, our cap table is clean.” It was not. Two advisor grants lived only in an email thread. A SAFE from 18 months earlier had converted on paper but never in the share count.…
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How to Scale Your Firm Without Scaling Headcount
Key takeaways A firm books an extra $300,000 of recurring work and the partner’s first reaction is dread, not relief. The reason is structural. For most firms, the only known way to deliver more is to hire more, and the talent to hire is disappearing. The Wall Street Journal, working from Bureau of Labor Statistics…
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Runway, Burn Multiple, and the Cash Math Founders Get Wrong
Key takeaways A founder pinged us last quarter with $1.4M in the bank and a board deck claiming “18 months of runway.” His actual number was nine. A sizable annual prepayment had landed in March, two engineering hires started in April, and his “runway” was really a screenshot of one unusually flattering day. We reconstructed…
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Is Your Outsourcing Partner Safe With Client Data?
Key takeaways A CPA firm we spoke with last year had vetted an outsourcing partner on price, turnaround, and references, then signed. Six weeks in, a client asked a single question the firm could not answer: where, physically, does my tax data live, and who can see it? No one at the firm knew, because…