Let’s explore a list of 15 startup costs every founder should know and track. Then we will dive into a few examples of how to add these in Finmark.
General & Administrative Startup Costs
1. Office Space
2. Equipment & Supplies
3. Legal Fees
4. Finances
5. IT
6. Human Resources
7. Insurance
Sales & Marketing Startup Costs
8. Your Sales Team
9. Inbound Marketing
10. Advertising
11. Agencies
12. Customer Success
Research & Development Startup Costs
13. Software Engineering
14. Quality Assurance
15. Design
Tips to Manage Startup Costs and How to Add Them to Finmark:
Determine your Fixed Costs:
Most startups will have fixed costs such as;
Office Space
Equipment & Supplies
Utilities
Insurance
It's good to understand how much you should budget for each of these fixed costs.
For example, a fixed expense could be your Office Space budget. Here is how you can add your Office Space budget in Finmark:
For this example, we entered the following details:
Expense Department: Administration
Expense Name: Office Space
Recurring
Expense Type: Amount
Amount: ~$3,000.00
Start Date: 10/01/2021 (MM/DD/YYYY)
Frequency: Monthly
Now repeat this process to add all of your forecasted expenses.
Budget Fixed Onboarding Expenses For New Employees:
Whether you’re hiring for a new role or replacing someone who left, budget at least $4,000-$5,000 for every new employee to cover “hidden” expenses like:
Background checks
New equipment (computer, desk, swag, etc.)
Any new software/tools they’ll need
To do this in Finmark, we will start by creating the variable for onboarding costs in the fX Variables section. See Below:
For this, we created a custom variable called "Onboarding Expense Budget for new employees" and set the budget to be $4000.
Then, we went back to our expenses section and manually added a new expense. We started by entering the following details:
Expense Department: Administration
Expense Name: Onboarding Expenses for New Employees
Recurring or One-Time: Recurring
Expense Type: Custom Formula
Start Date: mm/dd/yyyy
Frequency: Monthly
From here, we were able to use our Custom Variable and System Generated Variable to build a formula to forecast our budget for onboarding new employees.
This formula will take the new headcount each month and multiple the new headcount by the Onboarding Expense Budget set.
Fx: Headcount.New*Custom.OnboardingExpenseBudget
