Comment by linsomniac

>choose your own accounting software, do not be tempted to hire an external bookkeeper that keeps the books in 'their' systems (accountant lock-in).

~30 years ago I worked at a very small business (3 employees) and they used and liked Quickbooks. The accountant convinced them to switch to some "better" system and for around 3 months they had no idea how much money they had, they just lost all visibility into the system because it didn't work in the way they expected. "If things didn't look right, we'd just go through every screen in the system and press Post." At the end of those 3 months they realized they had unexpectedly gotten into $70K in debt -- this was ~35 years ago when a house was around that much. They had to take a second mortgage on their house. Eventually, they figured out the accounting system, righted the ship, and paid back the second mortgage over a few years. Y2K really helped, with that giant bump in sales.