Founder Fuel: How do you Manage your Business Finances and Cash Flow?

Sometimes a business is in growth mode and it makes sense to spend money to buy revenue, other times cashflow is king and the focus is on accounts receivable and payable. This stuff is hard and involves a bunch of things I rarely hear people talk about.

If you have your fingers into the accounting system like I do there are some tools to help make the bookkeeping just a little less tedious and give you visibility on where the money is coming and going.

Here’s the current software in my finance stack:

1. Dext – for automatically parsing invoices and receipts, it categorizes and sends into Quickbooks
2. Quickbooks Online – love it or hate it, it’s a defacto standard that’s hard to avoid for profit and loss, and balance sheets. and is the double entry accounting final resting place for all numbers.
3. A2X – tears open the payouts sent from Amazon and Shopify into the more granular transactions that make it up. These import into QBO where it’s then possible to see revenue and payment processing fees, returns and other transactions split out.
4. custom software – theres a few things that A2X can’t handle and for that we have some custom tools (nice to have a software dev in-house). It can help get COGS numbers across all sales channels, and display nicer reports.
5. Google Sheets – the most versatile tool for adhoc models, and tracking things. Flexibility and shareability is hard to beat.
6. Notion – notion is the home of all documented SOPs. These how to guides are incredibly helpful for making sure that recurring tasks are understood and done consistently each time.
7. Banks with virtual cards – virtual cards make it easier to give employees a card for paying expenses, and lower risk that if one card is compromised, a bunch of things will need to be updated. I’m using Relay in the US and Vault in Canada.

Is there anything I wish could be done better? Yes. The custom software is kind of a pain, mostly because so many systems it interacts with don’t have APIs and have to use fragile ways to get data.

And that’s it for this Daily Founder Fuel Journal entry.