Built a back office from day one with no in-house accountant, with project gross profit by day one of each month

Immediately after establishing the Thai entity, the small team needed to focus on customers and organizational setup. At the same time, accounting and tax operations began from the first day of business. Even when bookkeeping and tax filings are outsourced to an accounting firm, the upstream work of collecting documents, obtaining approvals, and making payments often remains in-house.

For a project-based business, tax compliance alone is not enough. The company needed an accounting operation that could show how much gross profit each project was expected to generate while the work was still in progress, so that the information could support the next business decision.

FinT chose Acua because it could do more than provide accounting and tax services. Using Acua’s accounts payable platform as the core, Acua designed an accounting process tailored to FinT’s business from a management perspective. During the first month, the team prioritized time-sensitive statutory work such as payroll, VAT, and withholding tax filings. In parallel, it designed a single workflow covering invoice receipt, requests, approvals, payments, and bookkeeping, with project information attached to every transaction as a standard practice. Stable operations began in the second month.

Acua issues sales invoices based on project information. Costs are assigned to projects from the request and approval stage, then managed through invoice receipt and accounts payable recognition in the same workflow. Because revenue and costs are organized by project every day, FinT can review preliminary gross profit for each project on the first business day of the following month. These are not final monthly closing figures: they combine recorded transactions with approved planned spending. However, they provide enough information for management to identify profitability changes early and begin decisions on additional spending, pricing, and resource allocation.

FinT’s involvement is now focused on sharing project information and providing approvals. Without a dedicated accounting employee in the Thai entity, the company can run daily accounting, monthly closing, tax filings, and payroll.