When the Books Are a Mess (But the Story Still Matters)
Startup X came to me with a familiar kind of chaos:
- A QuickBooks file last touched in the prior year
- A big GTM push underway — paid ads, affiliate programs, and a slate of trade shows, all strategically timed to align with a major expansion
And a critical set of questions no one could fully answer:
How much were they actually spending on implementations and customer support?
Do we really need to be shipping booth equipment all over the country?
What about all these plane tickets people have been booking on their own cards?
Here’s why it mattered: they’d just signed a pilot with a major partner that would triple the number of deployments in the field. Each deployment involved a mix of hardware, software, onboarding time, and ongoing support. The team had been tracking components in internal spreadsheets and project notes, but nothing centralized enough to support scale.
At the same time, they’d hired new customer support staff and rolled out tools to manage growth — but didn’t yet have a way to reliably track either.
And none of this was random. The GTM activity was directly aligned with the rollout — they were building pipeline while expanding fulfillment. It was smart, it was intentional, and it was working. But like a lot of early-stage companies, they were too busy actually doing the thing to rebuild their financial infrastructure in real time.
The founders needed to understand:
- How marketing costs were stacking up across channels and events
- What it really cost to install and support each type of customer
- How implementation spend compared to implementation revenue
- And what ongoing support was doing to margins
The books? Not even close to answering those questions.
🧹 Going Backward: Clean the Mess, Rebuild the Frame
Before we could start planning, we had to excavate.
We reconciled months of uncategorized transactions. Rebuilt the chart of accounts from scratch. Split out vague categories like “Software Subscriptions” and “Marketing: Other.” Mapped payroll to departments. Found stray hardware purchases — including things like iPads — that had never been assigned to a location or install.
None of it was glamorous. All of it mattered.
Because until you know what actually happened, forecasting is just fan fiction.
📈 Going Forward: Build a Structure That Matches the Story
With the past cleaned up, we built a system that could actually tell Startup X’s real story.
They were scaling fast in two directions:
- A multi-channel marketing campaign, designed to build leads around the expanding field presence
- A hardware/software rollout, with real costs tied to each sale — plus a growing customer support operation to keep everything running
They didn’t need to track every bolt and bracket in QuickBooks. But they did need to know:
- How much each GTM effort was really costing — across ads, events, and affiliate spend
- How implementation costs compared to implementation revenue
- What each deployment actually cost — not just in theory, but on the ground
- How support spend was scaling as more customers came online
So we restructured:
- Split implementation vs. recurring revenue (via a contract review to get rev rec aligned with service delivery)
- Broke out customer support headcount and tooling costs
- Created high-level mappings for hardware bundles (without going full ERP)
- Left detailed BOMs and install notes where they belonged: in the inventory tracking system
QuickBooks stayed focused on what it’s good at: financial reporting. Everything else was handed off to the systems that could handle it best.
🔮 Forecasting as Strategy (Not Just a Spreadsheet)
Once we had the structure in place, we could build a forecast that actually mapped to reality.
We didn’t just say “tripled deployments = 3x revenue.” We modeled:
- Per-deployment costs, including labor, hardware, and onboarding effort
- CAC by marketing channel — especially comparing self-serve vs. enterprise customers
- Recurring revenue by customer type
- Support costs over time as usage and staffing grew
It wasn’t just a plan — it was a map of the bets they were making. One that stood up in board meetings, investor decks, and weekly ops calls alike.
🗺️ If the Map Isn’t Helping, Redraw It
Your books aren’t a report card. They’re a navigation tool — and a narrative.
They should show you:
- What your business is actually doing
- Where the money’s going
- What’s working — and what’s quietly draining resources
If they’re not telling your story — backward or forward — that’s not a founder failure. That’s a systems issue.
And that’s fixable.
Let’s rebuild your map so it reflects where you’re going — not just where you’ve been.
Want to take a look together?