Firstbase Accounting For Founders

Most founders don’t realize this, but traditional accounting software can be a huge waste of time. These tools are designed for trained accountants and demand expertise in complex standards that most founders lack.

Imagine spending hours categorizing expenses, reconciling transactions, and making manual entries. The time and energy this process takes distract founders from what truly matters: growing your business.

In this article, we explain why traditional accounting solutions aren’t built for founders and introduce a solution designed to save founders time and simplify accounting.

What Traditional Accounting Solutions Are Missing

Traditional accounting solutions overlook the realities of running a business. Unfortunately, most current accounting platforms are primarily designed for accountants and don’t consider what founders need from them. 

Accountants are comfortable with the current accounting software interfaces as they need all of the functionalities and complexities these software offer, but founders have a hard time getting their heads around it. It’s like giving Bloomberg terminal to people who just need Yahoo finance. 

That’s why founders need an integrated solution that’s much more user-friendly and easy to use. 

1. Traditional accounting solutions fail to address founder needs

Traditional accounting software, like Quickbooks and Xero, cater to professional accountants who understand accounting standards and financial frameworks. These solutions expect you to be comfortable navigating complex menus, generating reports, and understanding accounting terms.

This creates a disconnect for founders. What starts as a search for a simple bookkeeping solution quickly turns into a frustrating experience. Manually categorizing expenses, reconciling accounts, and fixing mismatches in bank transactions turns bookkeeping into a time-intensive chore.

While traditional accounting tools promise accuracy, they bury founders in repetitive, low-value tasks. 

The bigger challenge? 

Many founders don’t even realize this is a problem; they think it’s just ‘how accounting works.’ 

Founders should focus their energy on growing revenue and validating assumptions, not wrestling with accounting software that demands expertise they lack or time they can’t spare.

2. Founders waste time doing journal entries

Manual journal entries are required for proper accrual accounting, which is what VC-backed startups and proper businesses need to have an accurate picture of their business financials. 

Journal entries and integrations with banks form the foundation of traditional accounting solutions. While journal entries are essential for bookkeeping, they are far from intuitive for founders and non-accountants. For business owners, they create unnecessary friction and demand unwanted time and effort.

3. Traditional accounting software makes founders do accounting

There’s a significant difference between monitoring business finances and actually doing accounting.

Traditional accounting software excels at reconciliation, tax preparation, and financial audits, but these are often low-priority tasks for founders. They need a tool to track expenses, manage budgets, and monitor financial health—not a system designed for accountants to do accounting day to day.

When doing accounting, the main goal is to record, organize, and maintain financial transactions.

You go through processes like:

• Input, organization, and management of data.
• Handling detailed financial data – invoices, expenses, and payroll.
• Correcting errors or making adjustments (if needed).
• Reconcile accounts.

However, when monitoring financials, you only aim to review financial reports and transactions.

The processes you need to monitor finances differ from those you use when doing accounting. These processes include:

• Carrying out analysis and verification.
• Reading, interpreting, and cross-checking entries.
• Doesn’t involve modifying or adding data but viewing and interpreting instead.

Due to a different goal and process, the features you need are more managerial rather than hands-on, such as:

• Have high-level data and dashboard access so it's easy to navigate and review data without risking unintentional edits.
• Access to dashboards with visual summaries (charts, graphs, etc.) highlighting key financial metrics.
• Search and filter options to locate specific entries or data points quickly.

The latter version of the software is something you don’t often see on the market.

4. Limited focus on automation and founder-specific workflows

Traditional accounting software overlooks what founders truly need: automation and workflows designed for their fast-paced business operations. Instead, these tools focus on traditional accounting features, leaving founders to handle repetitive tasks manually.

Imagine the time saved with automated bill entry, managed transaction categorization, or simplified metric reporting. These features could free up hours for founders to focus on growth. But instead of delivering these time-saving solutions, traditional platforms saddle founders with processes that cater more to accountants.

The result? Founders spend unnecessary time completing their books, time that could be better spent scaling their business and driving revenue.

Busy Founders Need a Full-Service Accounting Solution

When founders manage accounting themselves, they underestimate how time-consuming the whole process is. What founders fail to realize is that accounting isn’t just about keeping the books up to date. They need to stay updated on the changing tax laws and compliance regulations. Missing deadlines or making errors can result in penalties, audits, or damage to the company’s reputation—problems that can derail a startup's momentum.

Adding monthly accounting tasks to the schedule of an already busy founder increases the risk of burnout and errors, which can cost your business more instead of saving money.

Another reason founders need a full-service accounting solution is that hiring a full-time accountant is expensive.

The average salary of an accountant in New York is ~$80,000 annually. And that’s excluding benefits, bonuses, and other overhead costs.

It might make sense to hire a full-time accountant for some companies, but the volume of transactions and complexity of financial operations often don’t justify a full-time hire for most. Instead of doing accounting themselves or hiring an accountant, founders should use a full-service accounting solution that offers scalability and cost-effectiveness.

Firstbase Accounting: Built for Founders

Firstbase Accounting is a full-service solution that delivers tax-ready and investor-ready financials to founders without the unnecessary complexities of accounting. Our software and accompanying service are built for founders with the primary objective of minimizing the time required to manage a growing accounting function.

The platform combines human expertise with advanced AI to deliver accurate, real-time financial insights.

Key Features 

1. Metrics

Your metrics are the first thing you will see when you log into Firstbase Accounting. You’ll see an overview of core numbers like total cash, runway, net income, cash flow, and more. These are the metrics every founder needs to stay on top of their business finances.

Metrics also show a graph that visualizes your financial activities over different timelines, giving you an idea of your cash flow and balance over time.

Lastly, you will also find a breakdown of your top spending categories and the top vendors you pay, giving you deeper insight into where your money is going.

2. Reports

Firstbase Accounting allows you to create three primary reports: Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow. These customizable reports can be generated year-to-date, monthly, quarterly, month-to-date, or a custom timeframe, giving you the flexibility to analyze your financial performance over any timeline.

Reports include advanced filters, like the ‘Group by’ option. This option organizes your yearly transactions by month or quarter, giving you a clearer view of your financial performance over time. 

Apart from the three reports mentioned above, you can also generate more specialized reports like:

• Revenue by client
• Revenue list
• Expense by category, client, or vendor

3. Transactions

Transactions show you all the money debited or credited from your cards, bank accounts, payment processors, and other accounts. 

Here, you will find six key pieces of information:

• Date: Displays the date when the transaction occurred.
• Description: Indicates the platform where the transaction took place.
• Source: Identifies the card or bank account used for the transaction.
• Category: Specifies the type of transaction.
• Status: Shows whether the transaction is approved or under review.
• Amount: Reflects the credited or debited amount for each transaction.

You can update the Category to assign a transaction to the category you believe best suits it, which is then sent to the Firstbase bookkeeping team for quality control.

See an unrecognized transaction or need something else done for you? Firstbase Accounting allows you to flag it for further investigation. The platform also lets you connect with our bookkeepers to confirm the details via chat or by booking a call at a time that works best for you.

4. Non-cash entries

Non-cash entries are activities recorded that do not involve the movement of cash (money owed to you, asset depreciation, expense accruals, etc.). 

With other traditional accounting solutions, the problem with non-cash entries is that you must manually make a journal entry every time it happens.

But with Firstbase Accounting, you only have to provide us with a document or description, and we will create the manual entries for you.

5. Integrations

With Integrations, you can connect all your business bank accounts, credit cards, Stripe accounts, and other financial accounts to the Firstbase Accounting platform.

Most integrations can be completed in just a few clicks. However, if the financial institution you use doesn’t support integrations, you can let Firstbase manage the integration for you or opt to manage it yourself.

To reduce manual efforts, when you book a call with us, we recommend you create a view-only login for your account and provide it to us. This allows our team to handle the manual data transfer monthly at no additional cost.

Ready to get started with Firstbase Accounting? Sign up, integrate your bank accounts, and let us do the heavy lifting while you sit back and track your financial health.