In our series on startup hints & tricks here tips 3 & 4

3 – Get a businessperson into your team (and vice versa)

Basically if a techie, usually wearing jeans and T-Shirt, shows up in a suit at a table full of suits worlds collide. Both worlds – techies and business folks – don’t normally talk to each other. Knowing this, get the type of person on board that you miss in your founding team. A first-rate techie for a business driven team and a fine business mind for a techie driven outfit.

4 – Get a professional bookkeeper

It’s the product that counts not accounting records. True. A successful startup earns money and earned money wants to be booked. True, too. That’s the reason that a shoebox is a bad idea as accounting standard.

A clean book keeping setup is a hallmark of any well-managed company. And actually important to get the intricate book keeping details of social security charges and value-added taxes right, right from start.

Free additional hint: Swiss law stipulates that company executives are liable with their personal finances for all unpaid social security charges even in the case of a bankruptcy. So better pay up.