Chart of Accounts – definitely worth a thought!

Be as MECE as possible

Your categories should be:

• Mutually Exclusive – transactions clearly belong in one bucket, not several
• Collectively Exhaustive – they cover ~90% of what you actually do, without huge “other” buckets

Have the right depth

• Too shallow → one giant line (“Marketing”, “Other expenses”) that tells you nothing.
• Too deep → you’re staring at individual transactions instead of patterns.

Rule of thumb:

• It’s okay to go slightly more detailed than you “need”, because you can always group up later.
• It’s hard to get detail back if you never separated it in the first place.

Break down Revenue & COGS by what you actually sell

Your main products / services / items should have:

• Separate Revenue lines
• Matching COGS lines

So you can see true margins per stream, not just a blended number.

Break down costs by what drives them

At minimum, separate:

• COGS – costs that scale with clients / units sold / revenue
  e.g. payment processing, delivery, variable freelancer work, direct support per client
• Sales & Marketing (S&M) – costs that scale with growth efforts
  e.g. performance marketing, sales commissions, outbound tools, lead gen, events
• G&A / Platform & Tech – costs that are fixed or scale slowly
  e.g. founders’ salaries, core team, rent, infra, core software stack

From there you can add more slices that matter for unit economics and ROI, for example:

• By marketing channel (Google, Meta, referrals, etc.)
• By type (payroll vs software vs contractors)
• By team / department