Most startup founders spend 60+ hours every week on three vital aspects of their business:
- •The product: Market fit, value proposition, feature set, product development, roadmap, engineering.
- •The customers: Ideal customer profile, go-to-market strategies, sales process, customer acquisition, customer success.
- •The team: Attract and hire the right people, inspire the team, nurture the employees, build the right culture.
Founders who get these three things right have a good chance of seeing their companies grow, but there’s another critical element to consider for long-term success: finance. How finance structure is built within a new company will influence the scale the company can achieve.
Finance-as-a-Solution (FaaS) gives founders access to a full spectrum of tactical, strategic, and transformative expertise without the expense and complication of setting up finance functions entirely in-house.
Tactical: Day-to-Day Finance Operations
1. Transaction accounting: configure systems and processes for invoicing, cash payments, purchase orders, vendor payments, and payroll.
2. Financial status reporting: generate income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.
3. Cash flow monitoring: proactively manage cash spending to maintain healthy reserves.
Strategic: Finance Strategy and Planning
4. Setting monthly, quarterly, and annual expenditure budgets and profit goals.
5. Analyzing actual performance against budget.
6. Creating rolling forecasts.
7. Understanding how your hiring plans, operating expenses, and projected revenue affect how long your current cash will last and where adjustments can buy you more time.
8. Tracking KPIs and developing directional insights from financial data.
9. Ensuring compliance with tax and financial regulations to avoid potentially expensive errors.
10. Keeping accurate records of company equity held by founders, investors, and employees, and ensuring stock option grants meet IRS 409A valuation requirements.
Transformative: Scalable Infrastructure
11. Preparing financial materials for board meetings.
12. Preparing and organizing financial documentation that investors will want to evaluate during a fundraising round.
Fiscaliance provides founders with the tools they need to make sound operating decisions that support sustainable growth from the start.
Financial complexity will only increase as a startup grows, so it is essential to establish robust and compliant finance functions early in the company’s lifecycle.
Founders have three general options for building financial infrastructure, starting with building a finance team internally. With generous early funding and clear, achievable growth trajectory, the upfront investment in experienced staff will likely be offset by well-managed company growth over time. A strong internal team may still require input from outside experts in specific areas like tax compliance, audit advisory, valuation, diligence, etc.
A second option is to partner with a Finance-as-a-Solution provider. Founders who engage a qualified FaaS firm gain instant access to senior financial experts and technology-enabled systems that support operational efficiency without the time and cash overhead of building the function from scratch. The right partner brings automation tools, real-time financial reporting capabilities, and sector experience that increase in value as the company scales.
The third model is a hybridization that allows founders to build a lean internal team for core financial management and accounting while engaging FaaS services for more specialized functions.
Finance is not just about keeping the lights on. It’s a growth engine. Founders who establish a strong financial core from day one gain the clarity, control, and efficiency that enables confident growth. Whether you build internally or partner with a FaaS firm in a full or hybrid capacity, the goal remains the same: a finance function as ambitious as the business it supports.
About Fiscaliance
Fiscaliance is a team of finance and tech professionals with over 100 years of collective industry experience and a global presence spanning New York, San Francisco and Bangalore. Fiscaliance creates lasting value for its clients by delivering actionable financial insights, automated and scalable processes, and practical, cost-effective solutions powered by modern financial technology platforms that help business grow with confidence.