The person behind the site
About Daniel Mercer
I run the business side of a small company and write Founder Finances from what I got wrong first. Here is my background, my point of view and what I am not.
The important part, stated plainly
Where this started
I started a small service business because I was good at the work, not because I had any particular interest in running a company. For the first couple of years, the finances were something that happened to me rather than something I managed. I kept one bank account, paid myself whatever was left at the end of the month, and assumed that as long as the account was not empty, things were probably fine.
They were not fine. My first Self Assessment bill arrived in January with nothing set aside for it. I had been earning reasonably well for eighteen months and had almost nothing to show for it because every time the account looked healthy, I had spent or drawn it. The bill was not enormous by any objective measure, but it felt enormous because it was entirely unexpected and I had no plan for it.
That was the moment I started paying attention. Not to accounting theory — I still have no interest in double-entry bookkeeping for its own sake — but to the handful of numbers that actually explained what was happening. How much was genuinely mine to spend. How much was already spoken for by tax. Whether the cash in the account matched what the invoices said should be there. Whether the business was actually profitable at the prices I was charging, or just busy.
The answers were uncomfortable. I was underpricing by about twenty percent. I had three clients who paid between forty-five and sixty days late, which meant I was effectively lending them money at zero interest while my own supplier invoices came in on thirty. And I had no idea what my cash position would look like in eight weeks, which meant every large purchase was a guess.
Fixing those things did not require a finance degree. It required a separate savings account for tax, a simple thirteen-week cash forecast built in a spreadsheet, a conversation with the three late payers, and a price increase that I had been putting off for two years because it felt risky. None of it was complicated. All of it made an immediate difference.
Why I built this site
After sorting out my own finances, I started noticing how many people around me were in the same position. Friends who had been freelancing for years and still did not have a tax pot. People who had taken on staff without really understanding what employer National Insurance would cost them. Owners who were working harder than ever but could not explain why the bank balance never seemed to grow.
The advice available to them was either too basic — generic articles about opening a business account — or too technical, written for people who already understood the vocabulary. There was very little in between: practical, specific, honest about the limits of what general guidance can tell you, and written by someone who had actually done it rather than studied it.
Founder Finances is my attempt to fill that gap. Every guide on this site starts from a problem a real owner would actually have — not a theoretical scenario, but the kind of thing that keeps you awake on a Sunday night. The cash-flow guide exists because I once had a profitable month and still could not make payroll. The pricing guide exists because I spent two years charging less than my work was worth and convincing myself it was a strategy. The tax reserves guide exists because January nearly broke me.
I write it the way I wish someone had explained it to me: without jargon where jargon is not necessary, with the sources shown so you can check the rules yourself, and with an honest statement of when the advice does not apply to your situation.
What I stand for
A few things I believe strongly enough to have built the whole site around them:
Most owners do not need more theory. They need fewer numbers, tracked more consistently.
The finance section of a small business is not complicated. There are maybe six numbers that actually matter for day-to-day decisions, and most owners either track too many things badly or none of them well. My goal with this site is to help you identify the right six and build a habit around them — not to teach you how to read a full set of management accounts.
Cash is a fact with a date on it. Profit is an opinion about a period.
This is not a knock on profit — it matters enormously. But profit is calculated after a series of accounting decisions about timing, depreciation and accruals. Cash is what is in the account on Tuesday morning. For a small business owner making day-to-day decisions, cash is the number that tells the truth in real time. Profit tells you whether the business model works. Cash tells you whether you can make payroll this Friday.
Pricing is not a negotiation with the market. It is a statement about what your work costs to deliver.
Most small business owners underprice, and most of them know it. The reason they do not change it is not ignorance — it is fear. Fear of losing the client, fear of looking greedy, fear of being told no. I underpriced for two years and the only thing it produced was more work for less margin. The guide to pricing on this site is the one I wish I had read in year one.
Credit is a timing tool. It is never income, and it is never a fix for a pricing problem.
Used correctly — to smooth a gap between invoicing and payment, or to fund a specific piece of equipment — credit is a perfectly sensible tool. Used as a substitute for adequate pricing or as a way to fund ongoing operating costs, it is a slow emergency. The difference matters, and it is something I had to learn the hard way.
Any guide that cannot say when its advice does not apply is not finished.
Every page on this site includes a section on who it is not for, or a note on the situations where the general guidance breaks down. This is not a legal disclaimer — it is an editorial standard. Advice that works for a sole trader with no staff and no VAT registration can be actively wrong for a limited company with employees and a payroll to run. Pretending otherwise is not helpful; it is just tidy.
The thing that changed everything
If I had to point to one single change that made the biggest difference to how my business felt to run, it would not be the tax pot, or the pricing conversation, or the cash-flow forecast. It would be the weekly finance routine — twenty minutes on a Monday morning, before anything else, to check the numbers.
Not a full review. Not a management accounts session. Just: what came in this week, what went out, what is outstanding, what is the cash position, and is there anything that needs a decision before Friday. That is it. Twenty minutes.
The effect was disproportionate. Problems that had previously ambushed me — a client going quiet on a large invoice, a quarterly insurance premium I had forgotten about, a month where three projects finished at the same time and nothing new had started — stopped being surprises. I saw them coming with enough time to do something about them. The anxiety that had been a constant background noise in the first few years mostly disappeared, not because the business was performing better (though it was) but because I was no longer operating in the dark.
The weekly finance routine guide on this site is the most personal thing I have written. It is exactly what I do, described in the order I do it, with the reasoning behind it. If you only read one thing on this site, make it that.
Stay in the loop
I send out a short email every Monday morning with one practical thing you can do to improve your business finances. No jargon, no spam, just the routine I use myself.