Accounting, done differently

Jock Lawrence was using his Dad’s accountant for his farming software startup, Mobble. Luckily, he soon met our co-founder Remco through the SproutX accelerator.

“Remco had such a great understanding of startups and funding,” Jock said. “Standard Ledger’s knowledge has been awesome - how to raise money and how to make startups make financial sense.”

Mobble’s funding journey has involved several sources, including a seed funding round which Jock describes as one of the biggest challenges so far. Having the right support helped him dedicate the time it needed to succeed.

“Having Standard Ledger manage bookkeeping has freed up a lot of time. It means I spend less time worrying about money and more time thinking about the bigger picture.”

Photo credit: Zoe Phillips at The Weekly Times

Many parents lament the time spent washing baby bottles and sterilising water. For Victorian mum, Shannon Gilleland, the experience sparked her inner entrepreneur.

She set out to develop the world's first self-sterilising baby bottle - no small job. And with so much to do, she needed to find a startup-friendly bookkeeping and accounting practice to handle the day-to-day and provide financial advice.

“It just made sense to hand my bookkeeping over to people I trust, who are very good at communicating with me. It frees up my brain space and time for the tasks I’m more skilled at. That's really important," Shannon said.

“Standard Ledger has also helped us with our cap table, financial projections and valuation. Through working with them I’ve learnt to understand the numbers, which means I’m more empowered when I’m talking to investors and suppliers.”

When Choovie co-founders Shane Thatcher and Sonya Stephen decided to disrupt the traditional movie business, they knew they’d need a strong team around them.

“We started using Standard Ledger for our bookkeeping early on and it’s been amazing that I don’t even have to think about that side of things,” Shane said.

“But more so, they’re a financial sounding board for us and they’ve worked with us on all our capital raising, including doing the financial modelling we needed to get our initial investor to back us in the beginning.”

From there, we’ve enjoyed working with Choovie on one of the first successful equity crowdfunding campaigns in Australia. More recently, we worked with them on the rigorous application program for Skalata Ventures.

“Getting into Skalata involved a whole due diligence process, with everything that goes along with that,” Shane said. “I wouldn’t recommend going through it without the right support!”

In just six years, Public Sector Network has gone from a startup to a successful research, events and training company operating in four countries and setting up in a fifth.

They came to us early on looking for accounting basics - tax, BAS and end-of-year reporting - and our support has grown with them to include our part-time CFO service. Co-founder Charlie Hamer says this has enabled them to grow safely.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do it without them,” Charlie said.

“First, it was about sitting down with Remco to understand our business - our strategic goals, finances and team. Now, we talk at least a few times a week, checking in with our financial model. We’ve also leant on Remco and Mike to help us set up overseas.”

Victorian businesswoman Kerin Haddon was wearing too many hats in her family’s waste management business when she reached out for help.

“We wanted to plan an exit and needed someone to get us to the right level so we could realise the full value of our business,” Kerin said. With our part time CFO service, that value was maximised allowing Kerin, her husband and brother able to achieve a dream exit after living and breathing their business for 25 years.

By introducing technology, regular reporting and making operational changes we worked closely with the owners to professionalise their business and prepare it for sale.

“Standard Ledger guided us through the entire exit process, and handled it all from reaching out to prospective buyers to managing the negotiation and due diligence processes,” Kerin said. “Negotiating a sale like that is intense. We would not have achieved the result we did without Remco’s commercial acumen and cool rational advice.”