Online bookkeeper or accountant: what fits a startup?

Accountant is a protected title, reserved for people on the NBA register, and it is tied to specific engagements: compilation, review and audit. Bookkeeping is not a protected title and covers the recurring work: the administration, the returns and the year-end close.

For a startup in its first years the answer is almost always the recurring work. The audit obligation follows company size, and a startup is micro or small on every criterion. The full comparison is in the article below.

Online is not the same as cheap, and it is not a website with a login. It changes where the work happens and how often.

In a traditional set-up you deliver your paperwork and get a quarter back a few weeks later. In an online set-up the bank feed and the invoice scan do the capturing, and the bookkeeping is a running process rather than a batch.

• Bank transactions arrive automatically instead of being typed over from statements.
• Invoices are scanned and categorised on the day rather than at the end of the quarter.
• You see the current position, not the position as of the last close.
• Questions go through the same system as the documents, so the paper trail stays with the number.

Most comparisons stop at the monthly price, which is the number that tells you the least. These are the ones that decide how the year goes.

• How often the books are actually updated. Daily and quarterly are both sold as bookkeeping.
• Whether one person knows your file, or every question starts over with someone new.
• What sits inside the price and what is billed on top: returns, the year-end close, the KVK set, payroll.
• Whether the price is per entity. A holding and an operating company are two administrations.
• Whether you can take your data with you, in a usable format, without a fee for leaving.
• What happens in the weeks around a funding round, when the questions all arrive at once.

Worth being straight about. Online works because the flow is predictable and mostly digital. If your administration does not look like that, a firm that sits down with the paperwork is genuinely better.

• A lot of cash, paper receipts or physical stock counts.
• A tangle of historical years nobody has reconciled yet, where the first job is reconstruction.
• A structure that mainly needs tax advice rather than administration, which is not what we do.

We are an online provider and we do the recurring work. Not an accountancy firm: we are not on the register, we do not issue an accountant's report and we do not give tax advice. What we do is the administration, the returns, the year-end close, the set that goes to KVK and the reporting on top of it.

A fixed monthly price per entity: Starter 250 euro for 0 to 75 invoices, Growth 325 euro for 76 to 125, Scale 475 euro for 126 to 200. Payroll is always 20 euro per employee per month. Onboarding and migration are included, and a full switch takes five working days running in parallel with your current provider.