If you’ve previously worked as an accountant or auditor at a Big4 or other accounting firm, you’ve been through a rigorous & highly sought-after working methodology and have a huge boost on your resume. You’re now equipped to get your foot in the door of most firms looking to hire a Financial Controller, Head of Finance, or even a CFO. Being a product of Big4 myself, I have no regret looking back at the long hours and pressure my audit assignments meant, but in the long term, the lower salar...
Apr 05, 2024•40 min•Season 1Ep. 61
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 workload of running their finance and accounting processes. Request Finance the web3 industry leader f...
Mar 22, 2024•51 min•Season 1Ep. 60
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 be generational. So where do accountants go from here? Will AI replace accountants and 10 years fro...
Mar 08, 2024•47 min•Season 1Ep. 59
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 your DAO, and understanding the legal implications of distributing tokens to employees, speaking with ...
Feb 23, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 58
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 dedicated Treasury Manager, and therefore it’s up to that person to figure out things like custody, usi...
Feb 09, 2024•49 min•Season 1Ep. 57
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 Finance & Investments at Pixelynx , an AI music creation platform. Shivani is also a CFO Advisor at t...
Jan 26, 2024•37 min•Season 1Ep. 56
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 published an update that seeks to better reflect the economics of crypto assets, thereby allowing comp...
Jan 12, 2024•48 min•Season 1Ep. 55
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 subject to income tax and capital income subject to capital gains tax. Since tax is jurisdiction-sp...
Dec 22, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 54
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 as completeness, existence, valuation, cut-off, and occurrence that they use to develop their audit ...
Dec 08, 2023•52 min•Season 1Ep. 53
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 understanding of how to import 100% of transactions from block explorers is not straightforward. Through a 6...
Oct 02, 2023•26 min•Season 1Ep. 52
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 billing solution did not exist. Enter Super , a Web3 Subscription billing platform acting as a bridg...
Sep 18, 2023•28 min•Season 1Ep. 51
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 explorers, the monthly/annual reporting and cash flow forecasting can be very time-consuming. On episo...
Aug 31, 2023•53 min•Season 1Ep. 50
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 safe signer can create a safe transaction or that transactions cannot be easily edited without cancelin...
Aug 18, 2023•52 min•Season 1Ep. 49
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 Financial Controller at Aave , one of the most well-known decentralized lending & borrowing...
Jul 23, 2023•37 min•Season 1Ep. 48
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 successfully transitioned to blockchain, why can’t you? For the 1st episode of this series, I spoke wit...
Jul 07, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 47
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’s a messy way to build a web3 project. Enter Rain , a corporate card for web3 projects. Rain’s missi...
May 26, 2023•42 min•Season 1Ep. 46
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 much recognition for their work in these white-collar factories. So how does a consulting turn this bro...
May 05, 2023•54 min•Season 1Ep. 45
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 my accounting job, But rather it’s a bigger movement of accountants witnessing how technology is mak...
Apr 24, 2023•29 min•Season 1Ep. 44
Even if it’s relatively straightforward to export transactions from block explorers, how do you know for a fact that the data is complete and accurate? Block explorers have not been designed for accounting purposes, and turning the complexities of on-chain transactions into an enterprise grade data for your accounting is quite a challenge. Cryptoworth provides the operating system to convert the complex blockchain data from wallets, exchanges, and custodians into your accounting software to faci...
Apr 09, 2023•46 min•Season 1Ep. 43
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 they want to be paid in crypto. That’s because payments in crypto right now are push payments. On...
Mar 24, 2023•41 min•Season 1Ep. 42
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 pay your employees and contractors in crypto, you need a single dedicated payroll solution that takes ...
Mar 09, 2023•51 min•Season 1Ep. 41
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 - which would extract, process and feed in transactions from the blockchain to your Main ledger. If you are ...
Feb 24, 2023•34 min•Season 1Ep. 40
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 is inherently different from traditional stock options compensation. To help us understand token based comp...
Feb 10, 2023•45 min•Season 1Ep. 39
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, I spoke to Thibaut Sahaghian, the CEO and founder of Multis . Multis allows organizations to manage ...
Oct 02, 2022•33 min•Season 1Ep. 38
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 and blockchain without the need to use crypto exchanges is Monerium . Everyone understands how IBANs...
Sep 09, 2022•52 min•Season 1Ep. 37
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 establishing a new workflow for running your operations and getting your team upskilled. To discuss how compani...
Aug 26, 2022•44 min•Season 1Ep. 36
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 in a single source of truth to check the credit worthiness of its parties, thereby allowing invoice ...
Jul 29, 2022•41 min•Season 1Ep. 35
Proof of stake (PoS) blockchains will form the foundation of a more inclusive and user-owned Internet. If institutional token holders are primed to enjoy the staking rewards embedded within these blockchains, either by acting as validators or delegators on the network, accounting for those rewards remains a headache. Reason being that there is currently limited guidance from the accounting standards, be it US GAAP or the IFRS, on revenue recognition for staking rewards. To help us better underst...
Jul 08, 2022•49 min•Season 1Ep. 34
Crypto is subject to high volatility and even large market cap protocols are not immune to over 75% pricing drops. The majority of a web3 project or DAO’s treasury is typically held in their native governance token and turbulent market conditions amplifies the need for good treasury management. One that does not jeopardize the viability of the project and reassures the community on its financial health. To discuss operating in a bear market including survival, growing, hiring, and treasury manag...
Jun 25, 2022•29 min•Season 1Ep. 33
The adoption of cryptocurrencies also lies in the ability of that data to be easily extracted into any accounting software from the different crypto wallets & exchanges. As of today, the legacy accounting softwares do not integrate with cryptocurrencies for pricing, and accounting for crypto involves some workaround. One company which has for mission to simplify financial reporting of crypto is AEM Algorithm , with their product AEM Journaler . AEM Journaler is a Xero certified accounting pl...
May 27, 2022•47 min•Season 1Ep. 32
