Startups Stack Exchange Archive

Strategy for accounting with multiple currencies, percentage splits, cumaltive income records representing multiple items

Since 2009 I’ve been running an online games website, as well as producing my own and marketing them.

Each game has a different percentage split to resolve earnings between me and my team. Income comes from many organizations and currencies, some wired to a bank account, some through paypal. A single payment received usually represents multiple games. For instance I’ll get a checque from an ad network which collates all our earnings across multiple games for a stated period.

I keep track of it by downloading daily/weekly/monthly earning reports from ad networks, working out percentage splits for each game for each month, and then multiplying the percentages with the actual income received. Not to mention currency conversion when necessary (I receive mostly USD but report in GBP).

It’s simply impossible to check if I’ve made a small mistake somewhere, I put all my trust into my spreadsheet and formulae.

It’s reached a point now where it’s just too complicated to manage, any ideas how I can simplify it?

Answer 12198

Imagine a large company with hundreds of employees, projects, and clients. This company attempts to estimate how much each employee contributed to each project and how much profit each project has produced even though some projects may be intertwined, sharing resources.

Ideally, this would result in every employee getting compensated proportionally to how much work they put in. Everyone gets their fair share. But the logistics of estimating all this is huge. The company would require a large team just to track employee contributions and project profits. Mistakes are bound to happen.

any ideas how I can simplify it?

The larger your operation gets, the more it will start to look like this logistical nightmare. That’s why corporations compensate employees at a fixed rate: either per hour or with a salary. Although it would mean taking on more risk, it would ease your growing logistical mess and increase your potential profit if you could pay your team an hourly rate for their contributions.


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