Service
Startup Accounting
Capital structuring, entity selection and investor reporting for newly formed companies.
In a startup, accounting is not something to defer until the funding round. If shareholder current accounts, capital structure and expense classification are not set up correctly from the start, fixing them during due diligence is both costly and slow. My focus is keeping the books in a state you can show an investor from day one.
Who it is forNewly formed or soon-to-raise technology companies.
What we set up, in order, from incorporation to the first round
This order is not a preference but a dependency chain: each step assumes the one before it was set up correctly. The items that cost the most to fix later are the ones at the top.
Choosing the entity type and share structure
The LLC-versus-JSC question is less about tax than about how share transfers will work. In an LLC a transfer needs a notary, which makes an employee share plan hard to run; that is why most companies planning to raise convert to a JSC. Converting later is possible, but it tends to land in the tightest weeks of the round.
Capital structure and the payment schedule
When and how the subscribed capital is paid, whether each payment matches a bank record, and whether the share ledger stays consistent with those movements. The deduction tied to cash capital increases is a multi-year advantage when set up correctly at the outset; it cannot be constructed retroactively.
Keeping the shareholder current account closed from day one
Separating founder money from company money is a habit applied from the first month. Paying a company cost on a personal card, or a personal expense from the company account, looks small each time; explaining that account retroactively two years later becomes the hardest item in any review.
Setting up the expense classification
Which item is tracked in which account, and tagging non-business spending separately at the moment it is recorded. That single habit removes almost the whole problem of unprovable adjustments in a later valuation discussion.
The nature and period of revenue
In subscription models especially, booking a full annual prepayment into the month it was collected is the classic error. On the accounting side it is a cut-off error; on the investor side it is worse, because the growth curve in the deck and the curve in the ledger tell different stories.
The incentive and exemption decision
Which of technopark status, an R&D centre or the service export regime fits this structure, whether its conditions can genuinely be met, and whether that can be documented. The decision is taken early, because fitting the structure to the incentive afterwards is far harder than fitting the incentive to the structure.
Team structure and payroll design
Who sits on the payroll and who invoices: set up correctly at the start, this removes the reclassification risk that would otherwise build. Arrangements that look like flexibility in the early days get priced as employment risk in a review.
Books you can show an investor
Keeping the six items above permanently ready. A review usually looks at the last three years, so the preparation happens at least twelve months before the round opens, not when it does. Correcting records after the process starts does not build confidence.