Our advice for startup B2B tech businesses is to strike up a relationship with a tech specialist accountant early on.
Having someone to turn to for clarification and guidance is really valuable when you’re making those early decisions. But how early is too early? When you’re bootstrapping, you want to know when is the right time to pull the trigger and invest in support.
If you’re making/spending money and have to pay VAT, it’s often in your best interests to work with an accountant
VAT is certainly a trigger point for seeking out an accountant. It’s the worst of all the taxes because:
- It’s easy to get wrong
- There’s lots of money involved
- You know HMRC will inspect your business at some point
When you’ve got all these other plates to spin and things to be good at, you don’t want to be doing VAT yourself. Some of our clients have gone VAT registered very early on.
For example: We recently started work with two clients in the super early stage (3 months old). We started them off on a small monthly payment via our Launch Period Discount and got them ticking over with support until they needed more. We help them with payroll, VAT and Bookkeeping. It also means they have our expertise on hand. If they have a burning question about SEIS investment incentives we can help them figure it out.
But it’s not always as cut and dry as when VAT = accountant…
In the early stages you want advice to do things the right way, and it could come at a lower cost than you’re imagining
When you’re growing or building anything, it’s important to surround yourself with people who can plug your knowledge gaps. Especially when it comes to the finances.
You’re not shopping for cheap. You know you’re building for something, and getting the right accountant on board early on can change the course of your B2B tech business.
In the early days of tech business there’s just a lot of stuff. Stuff you don’t know. Stuff you don’t know you don’t know.
You can google and read things, of course. The internet is saturated with information, which is both a pro and a con! With lots of different perspectives, opinions and “facts” it’s hard to know what (or who) to trust. It sounds like a hypocritical take, I know, when you’re reading a blog post online as we speak.
The point is, hiring an accountant who does know B2B tech finance is a great way to shortcut the journey. There are accountants who just work with tech businesses. HELLO!
Once you’ve got the right accountant on hand, you could get an answer in 3 minutes that you simply couldn’t research online, or would struggle to get from a generalist firm.
With Thrive, you could get early support to ensure you are:
- Tax efficient
- Optimising your decisions for R&D vs Grants
- Making use of reliefs, incentives, and credits
- Clear about when to pay yourself and how much
- Not worried about financial administrative work
- Getting advice and guidance so you can work towards you future goals
Working with us doesn’t have to involve all these services. It could be a small amount of support to start with. Just having someone on hand who has worked with your kind of business time and time again – has seen the same experiences and answered the same questions – can cut through confusion.
P.s This doesn’t only apply to tech businesses and finances, by the way! It has been really important for our growth to plug the gaps in our knowledge with experts.
For example – we partner with Swoop for their network and expertise in raising debt, equity or grant finance. Why spend our time staying up to speed on something so complex? This partnership recently delivered an additional £160k of investment for our client Julien’s seed round!
“Because Thrive specialises in businesses like ours, we’ve been able to benefit from their network as well as their expertise. The partnership delivered a high-profile lead investor for our seed round and £160k” Julien Vaissieres, CEO Batch.Works
The best thing you can do right now is explore your options
You probably already know you need help with the financial side of things. And you’re probably looking for ways to minimise costs. You will reach a point where bootstrapping isn’t enough for your tech business and you need a dedicated accounting partner who thinks the same way you do.
Our best advice really is to talk to us. We work with tech businesses all along the journey from startup to series A. We can help you figure out exactly what you need for the stage you’re in.
The best way to get our advice is to fill out the form on our get started page. We’re all ears.