The Role of an Accountant When Starting a Business
When you decide to become an entrepreneur, you have to juggle several constraints at once to bring your project to life. That’s why it’s essential to call on other specialists in various fields, especially in areas where you, as the project lead, don’t have much expertise. This need for support becomes even greater when starting a business outside the Paris region, such as starting a business in Bordeaux, where you might not fully understand the specifics of the city.
In France, many entrepreneurs turn to accounting support for starting a business, in other words, calling on an accountant to help them navigate the various obstacles they’re likely to run into during this process. In this article, we focus on the role this professional plays when starting a company.
Starting a Business: Obstacles to Overcome
Starting a business is a project that reflects an entrepreneur’s hopes, but at what cost? Here, we’re referring to the effort and energy they put into overcoming the obstacles they encounter, both before and after launching their project.
Depending on the project and the nature of the planned activity, these obstacles can fall into various categories.
Psychological Obstacles
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Obstacles to entrepreneurship
The sense of precariousness that comes with being an entrepreneur stems from the fact that the activity itself is inherently risky: founders often give up the comfort of being an employee and face financing difficulties for their project, which brings financial and personal risk. As a result, entrepreneurs begin their venture haunted by the fear of failure and all the difficult reckonings that can follow.
With time pressure, which is sometimes accompanied by a lack of managerial courage, working around these obstacles becomes a daily struggle that can drain an entrepreneur’s mental resources.
Administrative and Legal Obstacles
When it comes time to start their business, entrepreneurs must go through a series of steps with public administrations. This means facing difficulties with the processing formalities specific to each administration, a lack of information, and logistical shortcomings tied to their project. On top of this come the limitations of legal frameworks (tax code and investment incentive code) and laws relating to corporate law, commercial law, competition law, consumer law, and banking law.
Other Types of Obstacles
During the early stages of a business, its owners may run into other problems, particularly economic ones, such as:
- Rising costs
- The shadow economy
- Customs barriers.
- Commercial dumping
- The cost of investment credit lines
- Interest rates that can, in some cases, be sky-high
- A lack of manuals and operational benchmarks
Managing these obstacles becomes increasingly complicated depending on the scale of investment involved. For example, when starting a business in Bordeaux, entrepreneurs need to be extra vigilant given the particularities of the region they’re investing in (Nouvelle-Aquitaine). As a result, it’s always recommended to get support from knowledgeable professionals. That’s why demand for business-creation support in Bordeaux is becoming increasingly common in France.
Why Should an Entrepreneur Turn to an Accountant?
Whether before or after starting their business, an entrepreneur needs tailored support, which they can find in an accountant.
Source: Pixabay
An accountant at work
This numbers professional, through their versatile skills and academic training in accounting, legal, tax, and financial matters, is well-equipped to give entrepreneurs what they lack or only have a passing knowledge of. What exactly does accounting support for starting a business look like? What are the different responsibilities that fall to this professional? The answer lies in the section below.
Accounting Support for Starting a Business: An Accountant’s Responsibilities
During the startup phases, having an accounting expert involved is more than useful for keeping all operations on track. Generally speaking, there are three phases in which the accountant carries out a number of tasks.
The Pre-Creation Phase
During this phase, this support mainly focuses on:
- Choosing the business’s legal structure, which should be based on various factors such as invested capital, the number of shareholders, or the nature of the activity.
- Choosing the business owner’s social status.
- Choosing the business’s tax regime, which has a direct impact on the entrepreneur’s personal assets.
- Identifying the assistance programs the entrepreneur may be eligible for.
- Creating the business plan.
The Creation Phase
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Accounting support for administrative formalities
During this phase, accounting support for starting a business mainly focuses on the legal side of the profession.
- Drafting and registering the articles of association and completing the various administrative formalities
- Setting up a shareholders’ agreement.
- Drafting minutes of general meetings.
- Handling the required notices in the legal announcements journal.
The Post-Creation Phase
During this phase, the accountant provides the following services:
- Setting up management tools such as dashboards.
- Handling social obligations (payslips, social security and tax filings)
- Identifying the accounting and administrative structure best suited to the business
- Maintaining the business’s books and preparing its financial statements.
- Ensuring compliance with the legal formalities governing business operations (approval of annual accounts and changes to the articles of association)
