How did you guys find an accountant?

[frank12]

We are an extremely small (~4k MRR, but growing!) 2 person SaaS start up, with a c-corp. We are selling internationally, and using Stripe.

We are looking to find an accountant who can help us with the following:

- Helping us plan / strategize around business expenses and taxes

- Handle international taxes for us

- Handle US taxes

- Looking for an accountant we can actually talk to and ask questions to, instead of a large cookie-cutter H&R block type deal.

I think for the most part we should be a simple case.

 

[pragyana]

@frank12 Would look in your network. If a lawyer helped you with your C-Corp, ask if they know any good CPAs.

If you bank with Mercury, they have some perks for connecting with accounting services. Rippling/Gusto/similar SaaS for SMB/startups should have similar perks too.

There are a lot of CPAs out there that have multiple small business clients, so a Google or LinkedIn search should help you get a list going to reach out to.

 

[frank12]

@pragyana Have you personally used any of those affiliated accounting services? We use both stripe and mercury, but I'm not sure how much I trust those types of services.

 

[kates]

@frank12 I hired a bookkeeper on Upwork for some light bookkeeping. She was so amazing she took over the entire payroll, expense, and accounting department at our law firm.

 

[toni2u]

@frank12 I think the first step is knowing what kind of account you're looking for. There's a lot of specialization in accounting.

Financial Accountants

These accountants help you maintain your day-to-day books and records. They track, categorize and pay your bills. They handle the financial operations.

There's a scale here.

There are bookkeepers, which aren't CPAs and do work for lots of small businesses.

Some of them can do taxes. Most of them are pretty bad.

There are outsourcing firms. Most of which hand off the work overseas with a chance of being ok.

And there are fractional CFOs that can help with managing these resources and business strategy like positioning, pricing and fundraising.

Managerial Accountants

These accountants usually make adjustments to your traditional financials to help you understand your business. For SaaS, this is measuring ARR, CAC and LTV to help you determine whether the product should receive more investment. This is a dying breed of accountant and many Financial Accountants will say they can do this, but if they don't have experience with SaaS they will probably do a bad job.

Tax Accountants

Then there are tax accountants. Some bookkeepers will do this if it's basic, but most companies outsource this to a tax specialist firm.

The firms with different target markets (e.g. H&R Block for consumers and Deloitte or PwC for billion dollar businesses).

It sounds like from your post, this is what you're probably looking for. A good fit here is regional firm with SaaS experience to help you with some tax strategy. They're reasonable but not cheap and can deal with crossborder issues. In general, the more jurisdictions in which you operate, the more expensive it is to do your taxes.

A caveat: The accounting industry is in crisis as too few people are going into the profession because others that require a similar skill set (like data science) pay more and don't require exams or additional years of school. So good accountants are becoming even fewer and far between.

I'm a fractional CFO. If you DM me, I can intro you to a midsize tax firm that will be able to provide pricing.

 

[mrss]

@frank12 This is hard, especially if you want someone that really understands the nuances of things like qsbs . I interviewed probably 30 accountants before selecting one. Got most of my references from microconf.

 

[theeddyswimmer]

@frank12 Commenting (also curious). I was just going to ask someone I sort of trust but idk....

 

[pnku002]

@frank12 We know a guy here in town. It’s easier when you can meet face to face I’ve found. You can find some on Upwork if you don’t care about meeting in person.

 

[yetzer]

@frank12 UpWork for an affordable solution. Don't get stuck in one of those crappy situations where you are paying an accountant on a monthly basis to handle your "books" unless you absolutely see value in something like that.

 

[brigarcia]

@frank12 I have someone I found on Reddit, who I highly recommend. Feel free to send me a message. I don’t gain anything by sending you to them.

 

[frank12]

@brigarcia dmed you!

 

[ktkls90]

@frank12 Congrats on the 4k MRR—it's a great start

Sounds like you're growing fast and are looking for an accountant that scales with you that also actually gets startups.

I'm biased because I'm its CEO, but would love to see if Pilot can help—We've helped thousands of startups from preseed to Series D, and we have very deep integrations with Mercury, Stripe, and the rest of the standard startup stack. (We're actually the most popular accounting service among Mercury clients, according to their [their post](https://mercury.com/raise/software-stack/tools/pilot))

Feel free to DM or email me @ [waseem@pilot.com](mailto:waseem@pilot.com) if I can be helpful at all, regardless of whether or not you end up working with us.