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I run a SaaS company, and I'm curious why I would need a product like this. Here's how I handle things now: 1. Stripe charges my customers' credit cards every
by Meekro 9y ago
I run a SaaS company, and I'm curious why I would need a product like this. Here's how I handle things now:
1. Stripe charges my customers' credit cards every month, and deposits money into my bank account once a week. If I want to check my revenues, I just go to Stripe's website and download the CSVs.
2. All expenses are run through a company credit card. If I want to check my expenses, I just go to my bank's site and download transaction CSVs for the card. If I want to graph them by month or whatever, I can just import that CSV into Excel.
3. For tax purposes, I need to break down #2 into categories of deductible expenses. I just wrote a perl script parse the credit card CSVs and match descriptions. So for example, it'd have a rule like "/digitalocean/ -> Cloud Hosting" and so on.
I admit I'm super-ignorant in this area, but the above solution seems to work without requiring any ongoing effort on my part. How would something like Pilot improve things for me?
- obblekk 9y agoat some point of scale, it's not feasible to run all expenses through a credit card. Companies start asking for direct invoicing with bank transfers as payment to avoid the fees on credit card transactions.
- awad 9y agoBeing completely ignorant of your business and noting that all businesses are different, here are some generic considerations around each of the points you raise. 1) Do customers prepay for a month or pay after services have been rendered? Cancellation terms and prorating? There are accounting nuances to each which of course can matter greatly or not very much depending on the particulars of your set up. 2) Running expenses through a company credit card certainly makes things easier but the same considerations as above can also apply...do you prepay for any services? Have long term service contracts even if you pay monthly? 3) Speaking of taxes, do you have a payroll? That's a whole rabbit hole onto itself. As with most things, context is everything here. Having a proper set of financials that adhere to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) are absolutely needed for any fundraising or M&A activities you might do. At minimum, a more precise set of financials can help with understanding the nitty gritty of the business when it comes to forecasting and at-glance health of the business.
- jsmith99 9y agoThe main thing you're missing is accruals based accounting. How do you analyse your monthly accounts when you have expenses that are billed yearly?