Grow SImple aims for accuracy and transparency in both our books and how our service works. If anything remains unclear or if you have a question not covered in this FAQ, please send us a message and we will happily get you the answers you need.
Our bookkeeping and tax plans are based on an annual subscription model with transparent pricing that scales with your expense rate and your business needs such as connected institutions, bills, and invoices. See our pricing page for more details.
Yes! Support is included in your plan. Your dedicated finance expert is happy to answer any questions you might have. We strive to respond to inquiries in a business day or less. See our pricing page for more details.
Yes, we’re happy to provide this support as an additional service. Please contact your sales rep for details.
Cash bookkeeping only tracks when money enters or leaves a bank account. Accrual bookkeeping is a more
sophisticated approach that records when the money was earned or owed. Most larger companies use accrual
and Grow SImple does accrual from day one so there’s no painful transition later.
We have over a thousand customers ranging in all sizes and spanning many industries. We specialize in
working with high-growth technology startups, ecommerce providers, professional services, non–profits
and more. Get in touch with us to see if Grow SImple is the right fit for
you.
We have three requirements that allow us to deliver the most accurate books for your business.
We can support you if your company is a US entity, no matter where you are based in the world. We can
also provide US entities with foreign subsidiaries with consolidated reporting. As of now, we do not
support foreign entities.
They are not included by default, but you can add them to any plan. Please ask your sales rep for
details.
Yes, we support bookkeeping for companies who’ve been awarded SBIR grants. Grow SImple has deep expertise in
working with complex SBIR bookkeeping requirements, such as dealing with indirect costs, unallowable
expenses, and more.
Yes – Grow SImple offers special discount pricing for pre–revenue companies. Qualified companies can receive $200 off per month for the first year. Contact us to learn more.
We understand the importance of predictability and transparency. Every month, we’ll average your prior 3 months of books to understand your current expenses, as well as how your financial institution connections, special transactions, and hours of support have changed.
For pricing purposes, we include in expenses the money your company spends each month, including
payroll, cost of goods sold, and distributions.
Our goal is simple and transparent pricing. In examining different models, we found that expenses
closely reflected business complexity while also having the advantage of being simple to calculate. To
determine the best Grow SImple plan for your business’ needs, we also factor in the number of financial
institutions, transactions, and hours of support.
Your subscription will continue until the end of your billing cycle. If you decide not to renew after
the year is over, you can let us know in advance and we’ll stop billing you for the next cycle.
No, if your business is growing rapidly, your books are growing in complexity as well. If your expenses
and other support needs change and exceeds the amount you’ve prepaid for, you’ll get billed the
difference that month.
Yes, there’s an onboarding fee equal to one month of bookkeeping to help us make sure your setup
process is a smooth one.
Grow SImple does all of its bookkeeping in QuickBooks Online because it offers a number of advantages:
Yes, we can help you transition your books over to QBO. As part of our onboarding process, we’ll make monthly journal entries in Quickbooks from your monthly account totals in Xero (for both the balance sheet and the P&L/income statement) going back to the beginning of the year.
You have a couple of options for doing your taxes when you use Grow SImple.
The first option is to use Grow SImple Tax. Please note that tax preparation is not included in your Grow SImple Bookkeeping subscription – you must purchase Grow SImple Tax for those services.
The second option is to use a firm of your choice and have Grow SImple hand off your prepared books to them. This handoff is included in your Grow SImple Bookkeeping subscription at no additional cost.
Grow SImple Tax includes federal, state, and city level income tax preparation as well as various informational reporting compliance (Form 1099-MISC, W8-BEN) and unlimited email support. Please see the full scope of services here.
Yes, we’ll generally want to take a look at the year’s books to make sure they meet our standards, but
many of Grow SImple Tax customers started Grow SImple halfway through the year.
At this time, Grow SImple does not file personal income taxes.
If you use Grow SImple Tax, we will ask you for a list of vendors who require 1099s, follow up with those vendors, and file the forms for you. If you are only using Grow SImple Bookkeeping, we are not able to file 1099 forms for you.
If your business has less than $5 million in annual revenue, and it's been less than five (5) years since your first gross receipts/sales, you can frequently reduce your Social Security Payroll tax liability under the PATH Act R&D credit. If you do not qualify under the PATH Act R&D Credit, you can take regular R&D Credit against income taxes (rather than against payroll taxes).
Qualifying R&D expenses and/or activities are those which pass this four-part test:
Unlimited, if applying the R&D credit against income taxes. These credits can range between 5% and 15% of qualifying R&D costs. If taking the PATH Act R&D credit, a company can receive up to $250k against payroll taxes and take the remainder against income taxes.
As an example, for an unprofitable 5-person tech startup that has less than $5M in annual revenue with roughly 80% of time being spent on qualifying R&D activities, and average salary of $100k/year, the credit might be between $20k to $60k. Grow SImple’s fee is a small percentage of the total qualifying R&D expense and easily pays for itself by securing the R&D Tax Credit for you.
Yes, we can help you file an amended tax return to claim the R&D credit for previously filed Income Tax returns (past 3 years), but you cannot take the PATH Act R&D credit on an amended tax return.
We help businesses with all aspects of claiming these R&D Tax Credits. Grow SImple will:
Yes, we can help support you in the case of an audit. For more details, please contact us.
Grow SImple recommends anyone who claims the R&D credit to get a study done. An R&D study determines the total amount the business should claim and collects the necessary documentation to support that claim.
When filing for the R&D tax credit, you must submit the relevant tax forms to the IRS. However, you must also have the technical and financial justification of what you were claiming prepared in case the IRS audits your claim. If the IRS audits the claim and you can’t produce technical and financial evidence behind what you claimed, you will need to return the money and potentially pay a penalty. The R&D Tax program is on the IRS’s "Dirty Dozen List". Once you’ve been audited, the IRS can also audit your claims for up to 7 years prior – so you need to make sure that each year’s claim has proper and thorough substantiation.
Yes, we’ll calculate the R&D tax credits and provide the necessary documentation for your tax preparer to file. If you use Grow SImple Tax, we’ll take care of the full process and file the necessary tax paperwork on your behalf as well.
33 states currently offer an R&D credit. Generally, the states follow federal guidelines on what
constitutes qualified R&D expenditures with few exceptions. Grow SImple will provide guidance on state
level credits. For example, the CA R&D credit is non-refundable which means it cannot be taken
against payroll tax. Work must be done in CA to be considered qualified and CA credits can carry forward
indefinitely until exhausted.
You should outsource CFO services in two situations:
Get started by filling out the form here. Our account executives
will set up a call to discuss what fits your business needs and answer any questions. After you sign up,
our CFO team will further scope out the details of supporting your financial needs and timelines during
a kickoff call. Our goal is to deliver robust financial analysis and expert support to unlock growth for
your business. For more details on our CFO Services, see here.
Online retailer and consumer companies face challenges around managing physical goods (such as COGS, inventory, supply chain, fulfillment), and often have complex selling channels (such as multiple platforms, differing fee and payout structures, and multiple payment processors). They also tend to have large transaction volumes. All of these things affect your books, which is why it’s important to have a bookkeeper with a strong background in your industry.
Grow SImple serves consumer and retail customers of all shapes and sizes, across different sectors (food and beverage, apparel, hard goods) and business models (direct-to-consumer and multi-channel retailers, manufacturers, wholesalers).
We have customers using every major e-commerce platform, including Shopify, Amazon, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Grow SImple makes inventory updates in your financial statements every month based on data provided either directly by you or by the source of truth for your inventory, such as an inventory management system (e.g., TradeGecko / Quickbooks Commerce).
There are several different components that make up Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) for a typical Consumer and Retail company:
For product COGS (i.e., the actual cost of the items sold), we base our calculations on inventory and
fulfillment information you share with us.
For Merchant Fees and Shipping Costs, we track your
metrics automatically and categorize your variable expenses in COGS.
For all other variable costs you
wish to track as COGS (e.g., Storage Costs), we work with you to create accounts and categorization
rules to implement this for your business.
We work with a variety of inventory management solutions but recommend TradeGecko/Quickbooks Commerce
and Skubana based on their simplicity of use and ability to scale. Read more about our recommended
technology stack for growing retailers here.
Our automation pulls this information directly from your store, ensuring you have accurate figures for
both items month–over–month.
Yes, Grow SImple can separate our merchant fees of all types in your Profit and Loss statements.
Yes, Grow SImple can break out revenue and costs in your P&L by product line and/or channel. Depending on the degree of granularity you’d like to capture, we recommend doing this in the P&L itself for simpler break-outs (e.g., revenue by channel) and via a detailed KPI dashboard for more complex analysis (e.g., monthly profitability by SKU).
For simple consumer and retail companies that have more than 4 financial institutions, we offer the option of adding additional financial institutions to your Core subscription for a flat fee.
We don’t currently offer sales tax services, but can recommend a number of software and service providers depending on your needs.
Yes, we offer KPI tracking and dashboards through CFO Services. For Consumer & Retail clients, our CFO Services team typically helps track KPIs such as marketing metrics throughout the customer funnel, LTV/CAC, inventory turns, and profitability across the product portfolio.
Yes, through the Fundraising Strategy & Support package offered by our CFO Services. Our experienced CFOs can assist with strategy, pitch narrative and deck development, financial and market analyses, and more.
Signing up for Grow SImple is easy. We think once you experience truly stress-free financial processes, you won’t want to go back.