How to Evaluate Your Accountant or Bookkeeper
Written by Aparna Devalla, CPA
Curated by Rubric Financial
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Red Flags in Your Current Provider
- Books are consistently more than 30 days behind month-end. This means you are making decisions based on stale data and are not fundraise-ready.
- Financials are prepared on cash-basis only with no accrual adjustments. This is inadequate for any startup planning to raise institutional capital.
- Bank accounts and credit cards are not reconciled monthly. Unreconciled accounts accumulate errors that become exponentially harder to fix over time.
- Your accountant is unfamiliar with startup-specific items like deferred revenue, stock-based compensation, convertible notes, or SAFEs.
Related Resources
Lease Accounting Under ASC 842
A guide to ASC 842 for startups, explaining how to put office and equipment leases on the balance sheet as a right-of-use asset and lease liability.
Startup AccountingInvoice Consolidation Across Products and Entities
Why combining charges into unified invoices reduces friction, improves collections, and keeps multi entity books clean.
Startup AccountingDeferred Revenue Explained
Why annual SaaS contracts create a liability on your balance sheet, and what investors look for in your deferred revenue.
Related tools and reading
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