Tech Startups
You are building the product, not doing the books. We clean up the backlog, track your burn rate, and get your financials ready for your CPA and investors.
The Industry
Tech startups don’t follow the normal small business playbook. You raise money or bootstrap, spend heavily on development and growth, and revenue might not show up for months or years. The financial model runs in reverse compared to most businesses. You’re spending before you’re earning, and the gap between those two things is where everything gets complicated from a bookkeeping standpoint.
The people building these companies are engineers, designers, and product thinkers. Nobody started a SaaS company because they love categorizing bank transactions. The financial side gets pushed off until there’s an external reason to deal with it. A tax deadline. An investor asking for financials. A CPA requesting books that don’t exist yet. By then, there’s usually a backlog measured in months or years.
Who This Covers
Who This Covers
SaaS companies, app developers, fintech startups, AI companies, and any early-stage technology business in Jacksonville and Northeast Florida. Whether you’re pre-revenue and burning through savings or generating recurring subscription income, the bookkeeping needs are real and they don’t go away on their own.
What Makes It Different
What Makes It Different
Subscription revenue hits differently than project-based income. Monthly and annual plans create deferred revenue that needs proper tracking. Contractor payments to developers and designers need documentation for 1099 filing. Dozens of small SaaS tools and cloud services create recurring charges that add up fast when nobody is watching. And the whole time, the burn rate clock is ticking.
What We Handle
Most startup founders who reach out to us have months or years of untouched books. Bank transactions piled up in QuickBooks or not even connected yet. That’s fine. Catch-up bookkeeping is one of the things we do best. We go back through everything, categorize transactions, reconcile accounts, and get you current. From there, monthly bookkeeping keeps things clean so you never fall behind again.
We also set up QuickBooks Online the right way for your business. That means a chart of accounts that reflects how a tech company actually operates, not a generic template that was designed for a retail store. Development costs, hosting expenses, marketing spend, and contractor payments all get tracked properly so you and your CPA can see exactly where money is going each month.
Catch-Up and Cleanup
Catch-Up and Cleanup
If your books are behind by six months or three years, we handle it. We reconcile bank and credit card accounts, categorize every transaction, and clean up anything that was entered incorrectly. The goal is accurate financials your CPA can actually work with when tax time arrives. We’ve done this for businesses across many industries and the process is straightforward once we get started.
Contractor and Vendor Tracking
Contractor and Vendor Tracking
Tech startups rely heavily on freelance developers, designers, and consultants. We track those payments throughout the year and prepare 1099s when filing season comes around. If you’re paying contractors through multiple platforms or across different projects, we make sure nothing falls through the cracks and every payment is properly documented.
Common Problems
The most common situation we see is founders who have been so focused on building the product that the financial side has been completely neglected. There are two years of bank transactions nobody has touched. Personal and business expenses are mixed together because the founder was using one credit card for everything in the early days. Tax deadlines have come and gone without filing because there were no books to file from. The longer it sits, the worse it feels, and the easier it becomes to keep ignoring it.
The other issue is subscription revenue that isn’t recorded correctly. A customer pays $1,200 for an annual plan in January. That’s not $1,200 of January revenue. It’s $100 per month spread across the year. Getting this wrong distorts your monthly numbers and gives you a misleading picture of how the business is actually performing. If you’re reporting to investors or planning cash flow around those numbers, the decisions that follow are based on bad data.
The Backlog Spiral
The Backlog Spiral
Every month you don’t do the books, the cleanup gets bigger and more expensive. Receipts get lost. Memory fades on what charges were for. Bank feeds stop syncing after 90 days in QuickBooks. Starting a catch-up project now is always cheaper and easier than starting it six months from now. We’ve cleaned up backlogs going back multiple years, and the relief founders feel when it’s finally done is real.
Tax Surprises
Tax Surprises
Profitable year with no quarterly estimates set up. Or a year where you raised funding and aren’t sure how it should be treated. April arrives and you owe more than you expected because nobody was tracking the numbers along the way. Deductions get missed because contractor payments weren’t documented and mileage wasn’t logged. We work with your CPA to make sure the books are ready and quarterly estimates are calculated so there are no surprises.
What Changes
You get clarity on your burn rate. You know exactly how much the business spends each month and where that money goes. If you’re pre-revenue, you can see how many months of runway remain. If you’re generating income, you can see whether it’s covering your costs or just narrowing the gap. These are numbers every founder needs, and they come naturally from books that are done correctly and kept current.
Tax time stops being a crisis. Your CPA gets clean, organized books and can file your returns without chasing you for missing information. Quarterly estimates are set so you’re not blindsided. And if an investor, lender, or potential partner asks to see your financials, you have something accurate and current to show them. That kind of readiness builds confidence and credibility, both for the people evaluating your business and for you as the person running it.
Financial Visibility
Financial Visibility
Monthly reports that show revenue, expenses, and net income broken out by category. You can see what’s working and what’s draining cash. Development costs, marketing spend, hosting, and contractor payments are all visible so you can make decisions based on real numbers instead of gut feeling. When it’s time to cut expenses or double down on something, you have the data to back it up.
CPA-Ready Books
CPA-Ready Books
Your tax preparer gets a clean QuickBooks file with properly categorized transactions, reconciled accounts, and supporting documentation. No more scrambling to reconstruct a year of activity in March. The books are done, and your CPA can focus on tax strategy instead of asking you what a charge from eleven months ago was for. That’s a better use of everyone’s time and money.
The First Coast's Trusted Bookkeeping Partner
The Next Step:
A Free Discovery Call
Tell us where things stand with your books. Whether you're months behind or just looking for reliable bookkeeping going forward, we'll give you an honest assessment and a clear price.