Bookkeeping basics for indie hackers

Why bother

Most indie founders do bookkeeping twice: once in a panic before a tax deadline, and once more when they try to work out whether a product is worth continuing. Keeping light, regular records turns both into a quick export. It also gives you the inputs for the numbers that matter day to day: MRR, burn and runway.

Bookkeeping here means recording transactions consistently. It is not double-entry accounting, and you do not need to learn debits and credits to do it well.

What to track

For every transaction, capture the same handful of fields:

• Date the money moved (not the invoice date, unless you deliberately track that).
• Amount, and whether it is income or an expense.
• Category, from a fixed list (below).
• Product or project it belongs to, or Shared if it serves several.
• Account it moved through: business bank, card, processor balance, cash.
• A short note: the vendor or customer, and anything you would want to know in a year.

Keep business and personal money apart. A separate bank account and card for the business is the single biggest time saver. If you cannot do that yet, at least label personal spending on a shared card so it never ends up in your burn.

A simple category list

Start with something like this and only add a category when you have needed it three months running:

Use the same list for every product so you can compare them. The guide to tracking several SaaS projects covers splitting shared costs between products.

Fees, refunds and currencies

Payment processors and merchants of record usually pay out your revenue minus their fees. Record the full sale as income and the fee as an expense, rather than only the net payout. That keeps MRR accurate and shows you what payments actually cost. If you cannot easily get gross figures, record the payout and a monthly fee total from the processor's report.

Record refunds as their own entries rather than deleting the original sale. You want to see refund volume over time; a rising refund rate is an early warning.

If you earn in one currency and spend in another, pick one reporting currency and record the amount that actually landed in (or left) your account in that currency. Note the original amount if it helps. Consistency matters more than precision to the cent.

Receipts and records

• Save receipts and invoices as they arrive, in one folder per month or attached to the transaction.
• Download processor payout reports monthly; they are easier to get now than in a year.
• Keep records for as long as your local rules require. Several years is common.
• Export your data regularly. A CSV in your own storage is a cheap backup.

Monthly close checklist

Block thirty minutes in the first week of each month and work through this list for the previous month:

1. 1.Record any transactions you have not entered yet, or import the month from CSV.
2. 2.Reconcile: does each account's balance match the bank, card and processor statements?
3. 3.Check categories and products on anything uncategorised.
4. 4.Review recurring costs: anything new, anything you no longer use, any annual renewal coming next month?
5. 5.Note MRR per product and its change from last month.
6. 6.Check gross and net burn against the last three months.
7. 7.Update runway and compare it with your personal floor.
8. 8.Check budgets per product and adjust next month's if needed.
9. 9.Set aside money for tax according to your accountant's guidance.
10. 10.Export a CSV of the month and save it with the receipts.

In SaaSMon, steps 4 to 8 are mostly reading a screen: recurring rules post scheduled costs, budgets show progress per project, and the dashboard shows burn and runway. CSV export is on every plan and CSV import is on Pro.

When to get an accountant

Light bookkeeping gets you a long way, but get professional help when you first register a company, when you cross a VAT or sales tax threshold, when you start paying yourself a salary or hiring, or when you sell to customers in many countries. Clean monthly records make that conversation shorter and cheaper. Merchants of record such as Dodo Payments, Paddle or Lemon Squeezy handle sales tax collection on the sales they process, which simplifies things, but they do not file your own income taxes.