The Accountant Quits Podcast

A finance technology stack is the set of tools that a business uses to streamline and optimize its financial and accounting processes. These tools and software typically fall into categories like payments, payroll, spend & expense management, accounting & reporting, financial planning, and analysis. Until now, web3 teams have had a fragmented finance stack, thereby increasing the manual wo...

Blockchain at its core allows the transfer of value without an intermediary and offers an immutable ledger that provides real-time access to financial data while AI-based applications can be used to analyze financial data, and automate repetitive tasks like data entry, A powerful combo for accounting. We’re on the brink of a fundamental transformation and the impact on the accounting industry will...

Anyone who decides to build a project in web3 involuntarily accepts to have to surmount heaps of legal challenges, to be legally compliant. Many web3 businesses are borderless and this places a big regulatory burden, especially for those in their very early days. Whether you are a centralized or decentralized project in web3, planning to issue tokens, finding the appropriate legal structure for yo...

While there is a lot of guidance and literature on Treasury Management in traditional finance, in web3, a lot of those concepts don’t apply. Managing treasury fiat currencies in traditional finance largely involves managing banking partners whereas with cryptocurrencies, that involves managing your wallet addresses in the event you’re using self-custodial wallets. Many web3 firms do not have a ded...

Choosing accounting as a career path seems to be losing some of its prestige in recent years. Technologies like AI and blockchain will not take the accountants’ jobs but rather, it’s those accountants who have upskilled themselves on blockchain who will. So rather than being seen as a threat, many accountants are evolving with blockchain. On Episode 56, I spoke with Shivani Phull , the VP of Finan...

The 2 words on every crypto accountant’s lips these days are fair value. Until now, crypto assets had to be measured at initial cost and could not be revalued at its market price. To make matters worse for investors, they were also subject to an annual impairment review, and any subsequent gains in the value of the asset could only be realized at the time of disposal. In December 2023, the FASB pu...

Are you as a company contemplating using crypto assets in your business? Be it for investment purposes or rather in your daily operations? The 1st advice irrespective of the jurisdiction you’re in, is to speak with a qualified tax advisor. Once you understand the crypto inflows and outflows, you can also determine the character of income of your crypto. Which fall under 2 buckets - ordinary income...

An external auditor is appointed to provide an independent examination of the financial statements to ensure they provide a true and fair view. And in return provide the confidence to stakeholders that management is doing their job well. Auditors proceed by testing the internal controls and performing substantive tests. What substantive tests mean is that auditors have a range of assertions, such...

The Crypto Accounting Academy is a 6-week course, ​​brought to you by experts in the web3 industry, to give you the practical knowledge of running a business on crypto. After the course, you will be equipped with the knowledge to be hired at a web3 company as an Accountant, Financial Controller and/or CFO. Learning crypto accounting by yourself involves months of frustration, as having an understa...

If a business has a subscription pricing model and wants to accept both fiat & crypto as payments, that would mean using a combination of fiat and crypto payment gateways. For example, Stripe works for fiat, and Coinbase Commerce works for crypto payments. The issue here is that the merchant has to manually reconcile payments flowing through these 2 payment gateways, and so far a unified web3...

The theme of this episode is tracking DeFi transactions, and providing the CFO managing their crypto treasury with how to generate a historical report of their DeFi positions, with their realized & unrealized gains/losses, interest income & losses & rewards earned. If you’re not using a dedicated crypto tool, and having to manually retrieve the data from inspection tools, like block ex...

While Safe (previously Gnosis Safe) has become the gold standard for self-custodial wallets, anyone listening who has previously used Safe, which requires the approval of more than one user for transaction execution, would often say that the user experience is sub-optimal. Some of the examples of the recurring pain points using a Safe alone for approving multisig transactions are that only the saf...

This is the 2nd episode of a new series I started called ‘Becoming a Web3 CFO’ - where I dive into the inspiring stories of accounting & finance professionals who transitioned from traditional finance to web3. In Episode 48, I speak with Jozef Vogel , the newly appointed VP of Finance and Operations at Ether.fi , a decentralized non-custodial ETH staking protocol. And previously Jozef had been...

The ‘Becoming a Web3CFO’ Series, is where I dive into the inspiring stories of accounting & finance professionals who transitioned from TradFi to web3.  In this series, we explore their unique experiences, challenges, motivations, and career advice. The reason I started this podcast was to inspire and prepare accountants for blockchain. If people with similar roles at similar companies have su...

Many web3 projects have a significant portion of their treasury in crypto, and paying for expenses like travel bills, SaaS tools subscriptions can be a headache as offramping often comes with friction points. Having spoken to a few founders in web3 startups & DAOs, often times these teams would rather pay for such expenses using their personal accounts, and then later get reimbursed. But that’...

Whenever I speak to people who are currently working or have worked in large accounting, investment and consulting firms, there is a recurring pattern I hear. The distribution of wealth is heavily skewed towards those in positions of power and authority, that is the partners of these firms Besides the disproportionate gap in remuneration, the people down the hierarchical ladder do not enjoy as muc...

If you’ve never listened to this podcast, this will be a good intro on the impact of blockchain in accounting. After recording 43 episodes, I thought it’s high time that I revisit some of the content and share the best best bits on what’s this podcast all about - helping you become a web3 accountant.  You know even if the name of this show is called The Accountant Quits, it’s not about me quitting...

The autopay function is prevalent in TradFi - think about all instances where payments are automated, like your subscriptions , loan repayment, salaries, utilities payment, credit card repayment. Having to manually approve such recurring payments would be a headache for you.  Today in the web3 space, projects having a subscription pricing model have a tough time automating these recurring payments...

If you’re an employee receiving your net salary at the end of the month, there is a series of financial operations that your employer must address. Starting with your gross salary, there is a string of deductions like taxation, pensions, social security, medical insurance before arriving at your net salary - the actual funds that get credited in your bank account. If you’re a company seeking to pa...

If you are contemplating to run your business on crypto rails, the framework for your bookkeeping is a combination of traditional and crypto native accounting softwares. Like any traditional business, you will need a traditional ERP solution softwares like Quickbooks, Xero, Oracle NetSuite being used as your Main Ledger.  And a specialized crypto accounting software to be used a Sub ledger -...

In order to allow you to hire and retain the best talent to build your web3 company, having a sound token based compensation is crucial. Resorting yourself to manually distributing and sending tokens is a painful process, and using excel spreadsheets runs the risk of making transfer mistakes or missing payments.  Token-based compensation is a new and powerful form of incentive alignment and i...

Embracing cryptocurrencies into your business can be a daunting undertaking. 3 of the biggest hurdles to going corporate with crypto today are the following; (i) First payments and treasury managements (ii) Secondly tracking your wallets and transactions (iii) And finally exchanging crypto to fiat To discuss how you can start building your business on crypto and embrace the open financial system,...

One of the barriers for crypto adoption today lies in connecting the legacy financial system to the decentralized one. While crypto ramps exist to allow the economic value to flow from fiat money into cryptoassets, and vice versa, the process can be painstakingly long for the inexperienced user, as it involves using a crypto exchange. One company that has built a bridge between the banking system...

If you have the intention to run your business on crypto, the traditional back office operations stack won’t make the cut. Your current processes around your invoicing and payments, accounting and reporting, tax compliance and treasury management requires an overhaul to remain compliant and mitigate the risks involved. The transition to having crypto on your balance sheet thus requires establishin...

The future of decentralized commerce will transform traditional commerce, as instead of being built upon siloed systems, it intends to be interoperable between its network participants. One of the foundations to achieve interoperability for commerce lies in tokenizing an invoice. In other words, having an invoice minted as an NFT provides an immutable document of ownership for commerce, resulting...