By Matthew May, CPA, accounting services leader at Acuity
QuickBooks is often the first accounting tool early-stage founders turn to and for good reason. It’s affordable, widely adopted and built to handle basic financial tracking. For entrepreneurs in the early hustle of building a business, it’s a solid place to start. But while QuickBooks works well as a general ledger, relying on it alone – especially without financial support or oversight – can create real challenges long before you’re talking to investors or prepping for an acquisition.
For many founders, the biggest pain point isn’t audit risk or diligence – it’s time. Managing your books in QuickBooks as a non-accountant is time-consuming, often confusing and full of uncertainty. You’re not sure if everything’s logged correctly, you’re likely missing key details and you don’t know what you don’t know. Over time, things slip. Founders fall behind. Books get messy. Then tax season hits and you’re hit with a big cleanup bill from your CPA.
Even more costly? Without clean, up-to-date books, you can’t rely on your numbers to make day-to-day business decisions. You’re flying blind when it comes to burn rate, margins or how much room you really have to make that next hire.
While QuickBooks is a helpful tool, it’s just one piece of the financial puzzle. To scale confidently, you need more than software. You need systems, structure and real financial insight that saves you time today and keeps you out of trouble tomorrow.
The Illusion of Simplicity
QuickBooks promises an easy way to manage your books and in the beginning, it can be. You connect a few bank accounts, categorize transactions and export some data come tax season. But QuickBooks can lull founders into a false sense of financial control – it has a ton of functionality, but it can be very cumbersome to non-accountants who are not getting financial advice or human expertise from a QBO account.
For early stage founders, there is also a staggering amount of time wasted on fully and accurately logging everything into QuickBooks. Time is valuable, especially as an entrepreneur wearing many different hats. Your time has a price tag, so outsourcing the accounting function to an accountant who knows how to efficiently and effectively work in QBO is a huge time saver and can help you to avoid headaches down the road.
More often than not, these SMB owners are not aware of an issue until something breaks and by then it’s too late. The cash runway gets tight, a potential acquirer asks for a clean P&L or an investor flags inconsistencies in financial projections. By then, the damage is done: founders are stuck trying to retrofit sophisticated financial processes into a tool that was never built for that level of complexity.
Cash Flow Kills (Quietly)
Poor cash flow management is one of the top reasons businesses fail. While QuickBooks can track transactions, it is not designed to help founders think strategically about their burn rate, upcoming obligations or how delayed revenue collection might impact short-term liquidity. When founders finally realize they have a cash flow problem, it’s usually too late. There’s already a shortfall, a missed payroll or an urgent scramble to raise capital.
It’s not enough to know how much money you spent last month. Founders need to understand how money moves through the business in real time. They need systems and leadership that help turn raw numbers into strategic insight.
Fragile Financials Undermine Growth
Investors today are doing more diligence, not less. In a capital-tight environment, founders must be able to demonstrate clean, reliable financials and prove that their systems are built to scale. If a startup’s books are out of sync with projections, if revenue recognition is inconsistent or if key metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC) aren’t trustworthy, investors take notice and they walk away.
At Acuity, we’ve helped hundreds of high-growth SaaS companies and startups prepare for funding rounds, acquisitions and board reporting. Again and again, we see the same thing: startups that treat accounting like a cost center instead of a growth lever are left behind. The best-prepared founders are running strategic finance functions that align with their vision for scale.
QuickBooks Is a Tool, Not a Strategy
Every entrepreneur needs a good general ledger tool and QuickBooks is one such widely recommended and implemented tool. With the right integrations and oversight, it is a reliable part of a larger financial infrastructure. But that’s the key: it has to be part of a system. A system that grows with the business, captures the complexity of operations and gives stakeholders confidence that financial data is accurate, timely and actionable.
That’s where financial leadership comes in. Whether it’s through a fractional CFO or a trusted accounting partner, startups need guidance that goes beyond categorizing expenses. They need someone who can tie product strategy to cash flow, help navigate investor expectations and build infrastructure that supports real decision-making.
Building Financial Infrastructure That Scales
What separates the startups that scale from those that stall is based upon how well they manage financial complexity in motion. You wouldn’t ask Salesforce to run your sales team – so why rely on an accountant tool to engineer the financial backbone of your business? At Acuity, powered by Sorren, we help founders graduate from “good enough” bookkeeping to financial systems that create clarity, compliance and real operational confidence. From reconciling multi-channel ecommerce payouts and decoding crypto wallet activity to producing audit-ready SaaS metrics for fundraising, we build the infrastructure that keeps them investor-ready, tax-compliant and growth-proof.
The earlier founders get serious about financial infrastructure, the fewer costly surprises they face down the line. QuickBooks is a great starting point, but it’s just a tool, not a strategy. To scale sustainably, that tool needs to live inside a broader financial system designed to anticipate complexity, not react to it. Accounting is a strategic asset that can change the trajectory of your business. Let’s build it like one.
