Accountant

At ten people, the founder copying bank transactions into one spreadsheet looks like enough. Money in, money out, and the company runs on that sheet without anyone complaining.

It stops being enough the moment someone outside the company has to read the records. The tax office wants filings in a set format by set dates. An investor wants statements that can be laid next to another company's and compared line for line. A bank asks for the same thing before approving a loan. A sheet that only makes sense to the people who wrote it carries no weight in any of those rooms.

Fundraising is where the gap usually surfaces all at once. Due diligence asks for three years of financial statements, and a company with only bank exports spends the next two weeks walking backwards through old transactions trying to remember what each one was for. The investment conversation sits still while that happens.

Deadlines hurt in a quieter way. Filings have fixed dates and a single day late attaches a penalty, which is a strange kind of cost — it buys nothing and appears only because nobody was watching a calendar. The accountant owns both problems. Within the four finance roles, this is the far end of the side that handles numbers about the past, and the one with the least room for interpretation, because the rules are set in law rather than by the company.

Most of the day goes into deciding which line of the ledger yesterday's transactions belong on. The typing is quick. The judgment is what takes time.

1. Collecting evidence. Card statements, tax invoices, payroll records, contracts. A payment without a document behind it can't be recognized as an expense, so chasing teams for receipts is a monthly ritual.
2. Classification. The same million won means different things depending on the line it lands on. Put advertising spend and a developer tool subscription on the same line and nobody can answer what marketing cost last month, and the question comes up every time a budget is set.
3. Timing. Accrual accounting records a transaction when it happens rather than when cash moves. Take 12 million won up front for an annual contract in January and January's revenue is 1 million; the other 11 million is eleven months of service not yet delivered, booked as deferred revenue, which is a liability rather than income.
4. Monthly close. The procedure that shuts a month's books: reconcile the bank balance against the ledger, fill in missing documents, and draw a line past which nothing gets edited. Only after the close can that month's numbers be used anywhere.
5. Tax filings. Value-added tax quarterly, withholding on salaries monthly, corporate income tax once a year. This calendar divides the accountant's year, and unlike most work deadlines these dates do not move for anybody.
6. Producing statements. The closed records turn into an income statement, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement — respectively what was earned and kept over a period, what the company owns and owes right now, and where cash actually came from and went.
7. External requests. When an audit or a diligence process arrives, every entry has to be explained with the reasoning behind it.

The finance manager sits closest. Accounting records what already happened; the finance manager plans cash from those records, so a late close pushes everything behind it. In small companies one person holds both seats, and the strain shows as a choice between closing the month and answering how much cash is left.

FP&A is downstream. Financial planning and analysis projects the next twelve months of revenue and cost, and checking whether the projection held requires actuals — which come from accounting. If classification shifts from month to month, the comparison stops working at all.

Billing operations is the frequent conversation about revenue. Customers who changed plans mid-term, failed payments, refunds: when the billing system and the ledger disagree on those amounts, tracking down the difference becomes a large part of the close.

The chief financial officer (CFO) is where questions go when a tax or accounting treatment is genuinely open to interpretation. In companies that also use an outside accounting firm, this seat is the channel to them.

"That's not this month's expense, it's prepaid. We paid a year up front, so it gets spread across twelve months."

The date the money left and the date it counts as cost are different.

"The books aren't closed, so that number isn't final. Give me three business days."

Don't put the figure in anything external yet, because it can still move.

"Without a document I can't record it as an expense. A card receipt is fine, just upload something."

The spending was real, but with no paperwork it won't survive a tax calculation.

Pagedeck still runs its accounting through an outside firm, with Grace acting as the monthly handover point. Last quarter the trouble came from annual prepaid contracts. Sofia brought in several large deals billed a year in advance, the bank balance jumped visibly, and the firm handling the books pointed out that much of it was deferred revenue rather than revenue. Without that distinction Grace would have built a hiring plan on a number that was never there.

The common reading is that this is data entry. Following fixed rules sounds like work with no decisions in it, and what shows on screen really does look like typing. But the time goes into which line and which month, every time. When those calls drift, last month and this month stop being comparable, and numbers that can't be compared decide nothing in a meeting. Hire someone junior, set no standard for them, and six months later the ledger is a mix of everyone's guesses.

The other assumption is that an outside firm removes the need for the role. The filings do get done out there, so it sounds right. But an external firm works from what it receives and doesn't know the shape of the company's own deals. If nobody inside separates which contracts are prepaid for months ahead and which costs attach to which product, the firm can process everything correctly and still produce a picture that doesn't match the business. The failure is quiet, too: the statements look finished, and the mismatch only surfaces when somebody outside starts asking how a number was built.