One goal we have at Puzzle is to support On Deck founders in setting up critical infrastructure so they can build the best startups.
A commonly asked question as a founder is, “When do I need to start doing accounting?"
The answer is, "As soon as you incorporate! You need to file taxes, even if you don’t have any revenue or expenses, yet."
This leads to the question, "How do I actually file my taxes as a founder?" Read the founder's guide to filing taxes to find out.
TLDR:
Tax season can stretch any team thin. With the help of Fondo’s tax experts and preparers, we’re here to guide founders through the complex financial waters and file their taxes in 2024. All for a dollar!
Fondo helps founders file taxes, close books, and get cash back. We’ve partnered with them to make tax season for founders a breeze. Puzzle will make sure you’re ready for tax season, and Fondo will get you filed with money back.
This partnership is where software meets service - keep your finances accurate throughout the year with our accounting software, and let the Fondo team take care of your taxes!
Sign up for Puzzle with the code ODSTART during checkout to get 6 months of access to all Puzzle features! Once you sign up, we will handle the rest, including setting you up on Fondo for your Federal Corporate Tax Extension and Tax Plan—all for just $1. Both offers last until April 10! If you do it now, you won’t forget!
October 2026 update: The landscape here changed significantly. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law on July 4, 2025, created new Section 174A — which restores immediate expensing for domestic R&E costs for tax years beginning after December 31, 2024. The five-year amortization requirement that took effect for tax years beginning after December 31, 2021 (covering tax years 2022 through 2024) is gone for domestic R&D. If you have unamortized domestic R&D balances from those prior years, you may be able to recover them on your 2025 or 2026 return. One important note: foreign R&E expenditures must still be capitalized and amortized over 15 years under the prior rules.
What this means for founders right now: if you filed a 2025 return (or extended it to October 15, 2026), your tax picture for R&D costs is materially better than it looked a year ago. But the rules around recovering prior-year amortized balances are nuanced — this is exactly where Fondo's tax experts earn their keep. Don't assume the fix applies cleanly to your situation without running the numbers.
What this means in practice: a startup spending $3M/year on engineering salaries can only deduct $300,000 of that in year one — creating phantom taxable income even when you're burning cash. If you outsource development to contractors abroad, the impact is even sharper (15-year amortization vs. 5-year domestically). See our guide on how to account for R&D expenses to understand how these rules affect your books.
The practical advice hasn't changed: don't file expecting a retroactive legislative fix. Budget for current law, run a Section 174 analysis for your 2025 tax year before filing, and treat any future Congressional fix as upside. Your R&D tax credit (Section 41) may partially offset the burden — but only if you run both analyses together. This is exactly the kind of complexity Fondo's tax experts are equipped to navigate on your behalf.
📃 Tax-ready financials with expert tax advice and preparation services from Fondo combined with Puzzle’s accounting software that makes sure your finances are accurate.
💸 Tax preparation is done for you with an accounting software that makes sure all of your finances are ready for tax season, so that you can focus on what truly matters—growing your company.
🔮 Financial clarity with access to real-time insights on cash flow, spending, burn rate, runway, and more through Puzzle’s accounting platform.
🤯 The most cost-effective solution – Fondo tax services for $1, Puzzle’s accounting software with access to paid features free for 6 months.
| Benefit | What it means for you | Who delivers it |
|---|---|---|
| Tax-ready financials | Books stay accurate all year, so there is nothing to scramble on before filing | Puzzle (accounting software) |
| Tax preparation done for you | Expert tax preparers file your federal corporate tax extension and tax plan | Fondo (tax experts) |
| Real-time financial clarity | Live burn rate, runway, cash on hand, and spending updated daily | Puzzle (accounting software) |
| Cost-effective bundle | 6 months of Puzzle features + Fondo federal tax extension and tax plan for $1 with code ODSTART | Puzzle + Fondo partnership |
Puzzle was built with early-stage startups in mind — including Y Combinator companies, On Deck founders, and accelerator-backed startups across all stages. YC founders in particular deal with a specific set of accounting realities: you incorporated fast (often a Delaware C-corp), you're burning investor cash, and you need daily visibility into runway and burn rate, not a monthly spreadsheet. Puzzle's accounting software is designed for exactly that reality: AI-native categorization, real-time burn and runway tracking, and integrations with the fintech tools most YC and accelerator-backed companies already use (Stripe, Mercury, Brex, Ramp, Gusto). Our tools and services are designed to simplify startup finance and give founders the real-time insights they need to make more informed decisions — from pre-seed through Series A and beyond.
As soon as your company is legally incorporated, regardless of your revenue or incurring expenses. You will have to file federal and state income taxes, payroll taxes (if you have employees), and potentially others, depending on your company's location and industry.
April 15 - The Federal Corporate Tax deadline. Note: the five-year Section 174 amortization requirement that applied from 2022 through 2024 has been resolved by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (signed July 4, 2025), which restored immediate expensing for domestic R&D costs for tax years beginning after December 31, 2024. Filing an extension is still a good practice while you confirm how prior-year amortized balances may affect your 2025 or 2026 return. As a Puzzle customer, Fondo will file this extension for you for just $1.
Check the 2024 tax deadlines and filing tips for the linked forms.
A traditional bookkeeper works in batch — you get reports weeks after the month closes, which means you're always making decisions on stale data. Puzzle flips that model: your books update in real time as transactions come in, so your burn rate, runway, and cash flow are accurate today, not on the 15th of next month. Puzzle also maintains dual-basis accounting for startups — cash and accrual simultaneously — so your books are ready for both daily decisions and tax season. You get the financial visibility you need to make real decisions, without hiring a full-time accountant or wrestling with legacy software built for a different era. (For a full breakdown of what Puzzle does and who it's built for, see the Who is this for? answer above.)
A traditional bookkeeper works in batch — you get reports weeks after the month closes, which means you're always making decisions on stale data. By the time you know you have a cash problem, you may already be two months into it. Puzzle flips that model: your books update in real time as transactions come in. Burn rate, runway, and cash flow are visible today, not on the 15th of next month. That doesn't make human expertise optional — it means the experts you do work with (like Fondo's tax team) spend their time on strategy and filing, not on cleaning up a backlog.
Your main job each month is reviewing, not data entry. Puzzle pulls in every transaction automatically and categorizes them using AI. You log in to confirm anything flagged for review — usually a handful of items — and Puzzle handles the matching and reconciliation from there. By the end of the month, your books are clean without a manual close sprint. If you connect payroll (Gusto or Rippling), those journal entries post automatically too. The goal: month-end takes minutes, not a weekend.
Yes — and this is one of the most common reasons founders come to us under time pressure. Because Puzzle keeps your books reconciled continuously (not in a once-a-month batch), there's no catch-up work before a filing deadline. For a closer look at what that process involves, see our guide to month-end close for startups. When the April 15 corporate tax extension deadline arrives, your financials are already clean and ready to hand off to Fondo. If you're starting fresh right before a deadline, Puzzle can accelerate the setup — but the founders who avoid deadline stress entirely are the ones who set it up at incorporation and let it run.
Yes. Puzzle integrates directly with Gusto payroll automation and Rippling so your payroll runs automatically sync as journal entries in your books — no manual data entry required. When payroll processes, Puzzle maps wages, employer taxes, and benefit deductions to the correct expense accounts and posts the entries for you. That means your burn rate and cash flow numbers stay accurate in real time, not just after someone sits down to reconcile at month-end. If you're currently copying payroll summaries into a spreadsheet or manually entering journal entries in QuickBooks or Xero, connecting Gusto or Rippling to Puzzle eliminates that entirely.
Not replace — but it changes what human review actually looks like. Puzzle categorizes up to 98% of transactions automatically, which means a 10-person startup generating a few hundred transactions a month rarely needs a full-time bookkeeper doing data entry. What you still need is a human reviewing the AI's work: confirming flagged items, handling edge cases, and making judgment calls the software won't make for you. Puzzle is built around that model — the AI does the categorization and reconciliation continuously, and you (or your accountant) spend roughly 15 to 20 minutes a week approving the results rather than entering them. That's not replacing a bookkeeper; it's replacing the part of bookkeeping that was always just manual labor. The expertise, tax strategy, and judgment stay human. Where Puzzle draws a hard line: anything below a 99% confidence threshold gets flagged for human review rather than auto-posted. Your books don't move without approval.
The short answer: software that pulls from your actual accounts and updates daily, without someone manually running reports. Puzzle connects directly to the tools most early-stage startups already use — Mercury, Stripe, Brex, Ramp, Gusto — and posts transactions as they happen. Your burn rate, runway, cash on hand, and P&L are accurate today, not on the 15th of next month when someone gets around to closing the books. For a 10-person startup with no controller or CFO, that daily visibility is what catches a cash problem in week two instead of week six. You're not hiring for a finance team; you're getting the output a finance team would produce, running in the background automatically. The goal is that a founder with no accounting background can open Puzzle on a Monday morning and know exactly where they stand financially — no calls, no spreadsheets, no waiting.
Puzzle the software is self-serve, but you don't have to go it alone. Two managed service tiers are available through vetted Puzzle partners (not Puzzle directly). Expert Reviewed ($99/month) has an accountant review and finalize your AI-categorized books each month. Full Service ($499/month) gives you a named bookkeeper, monthly close, and ongoing support. Both tiers sit on top of the same Puzzle software, so the automation runs regardless of which path you choose. If you want to handle it yourself, the AI categorizes up to 98% of transactions and the average founder spends roughly 15 to 20 minutes a week on review. If you want a human in the loop every month, that option exists too. Neither is bundled into the base subscription — managed services are a separate add-on, priced as shown.
Yes. If your payroll provider doesn't have a native Puzzle integration, you can upload a payroll report (PDF or similar export) and Puzzle's AI payroll agent will read it and automatically draft the corresponding journal entries — mapping wages, employer taxes, and benefit deductions to the correct expense accounts. You review and approve before anything posts. Gusto and Rippling have direct native integrations that sync automatically with no upload step. ADP and Paychex are permanently off the native integration roadmap, so the upload-and-draft workflow is the supported path for those providers. Either way, your burn rate and cash figures stay accurate without manual data entry.
This is one of the most common revenue recognition headaches for SaaS founders. When Stripe issues the invoice, Puzzle records an accounts receivable entry and defers revenue on the accrual side — if you want a primer on how those entries work, see our guide to journal entries in accounting. When the bank transfer arrives in your Mercury or Brex account, Puzzle sees an incoming deposit and may record it as a separate revenue event — creating a duplicate. The fix is matching: you need to apply the bank deposit against the open Stripe receivable rather than treating it as new income. Puzzle's reconciliation workflow surfaces these unmatched items for review so you can link them. Because Puzzle's revenue recognition is Stripe-centric, the cleanest setup is collecting payment inside Stripe. If bank transfers are your standard billing method, expect to handle the matching step manually or with your accountant — it's a known edge case, not a bug, and Fondo's team can walk you through the setup for your specific billing model.
For founders, it’s about having the right tools at the right time. If your finances are not in order, tax season will be that much more difficult, even with professional help. Puzzle's accounting software focuses on accounting compliance and delivering critical financial insights throughout the year. This ensures that come tax season, your tax preparation process is streamlined—it can be as simple as sharing the information from Puzzle with your tax preparer and letting them handle the rest.
This is how Fondo capitalizes on the automation capabilities of Puzzle to offer exceptional services to startups. The combination of accurate tracking of financials throughout the year and exceptional tax preparers creates a smoother end-of-year tax process.
