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&L, Cashflow, Balance Sheet).

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.

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!

[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.

[ecommercematt → swombat]

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.

[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)]

[ecommercematt → pbhj]

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

[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.

[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.

[ecommercematt → horatio]

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.