A PayPal transaction memo “shower labor” with funds going from a business account to your personal account and then back to the business account? When did the funds actually pay the contractor? Who was the contractor?

This is one of hundreds of transactions lost in the insanity of bookkeeping brought about by the culmination of lacking discipline, accounting ignorance, stubborn bureaucratic stonewalling from banks delaying account openings, and an operational necessity to continue running the business despite all this.

Accounting and bookkeeping has consumed every non-W2 hour I’ve had this past month. In the absence of any formal education in corporate accounting, my ignorance landed me desperate from frustratingly futile attempts to put together a google sheets system of accounting.

Once my innocence was crisply burnt from the complexity of pivot table construction and the limitations of manually keeping a general ledger (unfortunately existing fintech syncing apis at the time were 💩), I surrendered to searching for a 3rd party accounting software system to save me (and hopefully the business).

I found the QuickBooks online subscription. After having spent hundreds of hours attempting to build our own internal accounting system, a $40/mo subscription expense for a robust accounting software that would reduce time spent on accounting to minutes of maintenance was a sound decision.

Since I was far lost in the woods, I still had to reconcile the mess of receipts and transactions across personal and business accounts due to the chaotic shoebox financial bookkeeping method prior.

The light at the end of the tunnel was the discovery of the Chart of Accounts, which would prove to be the fulcrum about which all our business financials would be run and all downstream reporting generated. I proceeded to research and sculpt a set of COA for our business that would be good enough for both our accountants’ needs as well as our management needs.

I have developed a deep appreciation for clean books and a strong discipline in financial reporting. It’s the hygiene of a business, and the only way to prevent finding yourself driving a business engine totally blind.