What a post-seed Indian startup actually pays for its finance function

Vendor pricing pages tell you what finance services cost to buy. They do not tell you what running a finance function costs in total, because no single vendor sees the whole picture. So we asked founders. Here is one post-seed consumer startup’s complete finance stack, with their permission and without their name, because we think the shape of it is worth more than any pricing page in the category.

The numbers

Line	Pre-seed	Post-seed (today)
Outsourced CA firm	Rs 12,000 to 15,000 / month	Rs 25,000 / month
In-house junior finance person	Rs 27,000 / month at hire	Rs 50,000 / month
Total finance function	~Rs 40,000 / month	Rs 75,000 / month, ~Rs 9 lakh a year

Who does what, which is the interesting part

The CA firm (Rs 25,000 a month) keeps the books, handles statutory work, issues Form 16s, and reconciles card and expense data. A real scope, competently delivered.

The in-house person (Rs 50,000 a month) holds the bank and portal logins, gathers receipts and documents, chases the founders to forward whatever she cannot pull herself, and packages it all for the CA firm. Read that again: the more expensive of the two line items is a document logistics role. The receipt chase alone runs founder to employee to firm, three hops, all manual, for every corporate card swipe that needs substantiating.

The founders run payroll themselves, with the accountants picking up only the compliance tail.

This division of labour is not unusual. It is the standard architecture of Indian startup finance: a firm that does the accounting, a person who exists to feed the firm, and founders filling the gaps. The person exists because the firm cannot chase, log into portals, or extract documents from a founder’s inbox, and none of that is accounting. It is coordination wearing an accounting salary.

The fee that doubled with the funding round

The detail that stayed with us: the CA firm’s fee went from Rs 12,000-15,000 to Rs 25,000 a month after the seed round closed, roughly 2x, without a change in scope the founder could name. The in-house salary also nearly doubled, but that at least tracked a market for talent.

We will say the quiet part: a meaningful share of professional-services pricing in this market is indexed to what you raised, not to what the work costs. Nobody itemises it that way, which is exactly the problem. When the price of the same work depends on your bank balance, you are not buying accounting, you are paying a tax on being visibly funded. It is also why we publish fixed tiers keyed to revenue, trued up once a year against your filed GST turnover: a number the government already has, not a number your fundraise announces.

What this benchmark means if you are budgeting

If you are a funded startup doing meaningful volume, Rs 60,000 to 90,000 a month all-in is what the conventional stack costs, and most of it is not expertise. Decompose your own spend into three buckets: judgement (real accounting decisions, review, sign-off), processing (coding transactions, reconciliation, filings preparation), and coordination (chasing, collecting, forwarding, logging in). Then notice which buckets technology has already made cheap. Judgement is worth paying professionals for. Processing is what engines do now. Coordination should not exist as a job at all: it is a symptom of systems that do not talk to each other, priced at Rs 50,000 a month.

That decomposition is the entire thesis of CompanyStack. Bank feeds and documents flow in directly, the engine does the processing with a logged reason for every decision, a chartered accountant does the judgement, and the chasing that remains is done by software that never forgets a follow-up. The coordination role, the most expensive line in the stack above, is the one we are built to delete. The same three-bucket split is how we price an entity. A longer look at what changes versus a traditional retainer is here.

One startup is one data point, and we are collecting more. If you will share your own finance stack numbers (anonymously, like this one), we would genuinely like to see them, and we will publish the aggregate when there is enough to be meaningful. This category has run on undisclosed pricing for long enough.