Set the books up once, properly.
Your cofounder has been paying for things on a personal card. There's a spreadsheet that was fine at ten transactions a month and isn't at two hundred. Nobody has decided what counts as an expense, and at some point somebody is going to ask for a balance sheet.
The questions nobody warned you about
"What's a chart of accounts?"
A list of the buckets your money moves between. You get a real one from day one without having to have opinions about it — and you can change it later, because a proper ledger lets you reclassify entries after the fact rather than making you live with a bad early guess.
"Am I allowed to expense this?"
We can't answer that one — we're not a CPA and we don't give tax advice. What we can do is make sure the question is answerable: the cost is recorded, the receipt is attached to it, and it's in a category your accountant can actually review.
"Can you send me a balance sheet?"
Whoever asks — an accountant, a lender, a prospective investor — the answer is a report rather than a weekend. Balance sheet, profit and loss and cash flow all come out of the same journal, so they can't contradict each other.
Why "proper" matters this early
The cheapest time to have real books is before there are two years of them to unpick.
Most lightweight tools track money in and money out. That's a list, and it works right up until somebody needs a balance sheet or you need to know whether a line of work is profitable. Converting a list into books afterwards is an expensive project that lands on whoever you hire.
SutorBooks keeps real books underneath from the first invoice, and stays out of your way on top. You do the ordinary work; the accounting happens behind it.
Starting small, and moving up
- Free covers one person — invoicing and a real set of books, with two free accountant seats.
- Starter adds quotes and expenses for three people.
- Standard adds bills and bank reconciliation, which is the point most businesses need real books.
- Your accountant is free on all of them. Bringing in a bookkeeper never costs you a seat.
- Opening balances let you bring across what already happened rather than starting from zero.
- Full export, any time. If you outgrow us, you leave with your books.
Real businesses deserve better books.
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