5 months into a running a startup, the little things I learned | Hacker News Reader

5 months into a running a startup, the little things I learned

cucumbertown.com

44 pointsplayhard12 comments

Might I suggest a new home page for cucumbertown? It's extremely well done - very pretty, a lot of fun things happening.

It's also far too busy. I couldn't tell what I was supposed to see. Too many things moving and drawing my eyes away from actually reading. Too much scrolling. I closed it without trying to "come on in" even though I am likely in your target market.

It's a cool showcase of what you can do with HTML. Not so good for marketing a product.

Thanks for the feedback. We are on our way to fixing this.

GNUcash though ? I used that for a while and it was just so frustrating to work with. Even creating a custom invoice was a hassle. That application needs to be replaced by a cloud hosted app for simple invoicing.

Lack of alternatives. GnuCash is frustrating to work on mac.

An Indian startup here looking to register a C corp soon. How have you setup the two entities? Does the US corp get all the revenues, and pay the Indian company a development fee for the product? Which company pays the salary, US or Indian? Anything else to keep in mind while going down this route?

Delaware C Corp wholly owning 100% of the Indian subsidiary private ltd (Cucumbertown Inc, owning Cucumbertown Software Labs Pvt. Ltd)

C Corp gets the revenue(dependent on where you get your cash from) usually.

Transfer cash to Indian accounts and pay salaries, operations etc. You need to pay tax on that (Indian firm pays that). Pay Indian employee in Rupees and US in Dollar.

Well, we are not using it for any invoicing but just maintaining our records. The year end reporting to the CPA was a cakewalk this time compared to all the head breaking we went through pouring over Excel entries, bank account statements etc last year. There are other alternatives but GNUCash works well for our needs.

Do you ever see yourself transitioning to a closed-source or SaaS accounting package, like Wave Accounting or QuickBooks Online? If so, why? If not, why not?

Of course we would grow out of GNUCash some day. I have not explored yet on what solutions we may end up looking at though. Since we are not an e-commerce outfit, we can live for some more time with basic tools just recording our expenses. The day when we start issuing invoices (or if we had to procure inventory to convert to saleable goods), we would need something other than GNUCash.

That already exsist, in open source form. Just use hledger, which offers hledger-web, put in online behind a nginx and you are done.

It uses ledger compatible transaction files which can you edit and inspect manually if needed, offers a bunch of additional functionality, and is a joy to use, bot the web and command line version.

Say you have a financial controller (which looks at both accounting and financial performance) in front of you, what kind of questions would you like to ask? What kind of training would you like to get?

I think most important things would be: 1. Understanding double-entry accounting 2. Passing entries for liabilities and later squaring off them against payment from bank (e.g. credit card, deferred taxes) 3. Managing all the hosting services and other SaaS tools monthly payments as an expense item 4. Understanding how to account for equity

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