... / CofounderOS / Frequently Asked Questions - Startups

Our curriculum is carefully designed to make sure that every entrepreneur understands the fundamentals of startup business design and operation. With every answer you provide, we'll always provide you feedback that guides you towards a better answer. Your score will improve, and you'll significantly strengthen your understanding of that section.

All of our AI-powered Business Assessments was created to be iterative, where you continue to refine your answer until you're happy with both your score and the plan that you've designed while working with our AI mentors.

If you're still stuck, ask your ESO for help. Their mentorship interface gives them more information about your answer and they can guide you to a better solution.

One of the requirements to graduate with the Make Startups Certificate of Entrepreneurship are the formal business documents necessary to prove to the government that you have begun a new, legal business entity. In order to prove you've met these requirements, you must upload:

1. A valid business license from your state/municipality.
2. Any business formation documents (articles of incorporation, business registration)
3. An IRS EIN Certificate issued to your company
4. Any applicable licenses required for your business (e.g., food license, liquor license, etc)

You might not be eligible to graduate with the certification if you do not complete the formal business registration process.

The default File Manager that comes with your account has a few controls that limit who can see your files and under what circumstances.

• public - Files marked as public will be visible to anyone on the internet when they view your public Company Profile page. This is useful to share information about the products that you sell to potential customers viewing your page. You can also create a link to purchase that product on that product and generate your initial business revenue!
• private - Any file marked as private will only be visible to:
  • Anyone on your company team
  • The ESO or ESOs supporting your organization
• ESO Shared - This is a private file that was uploaded by your ESO. It is only visible to that specific ESO and the members of your team.
• logo - Any file marked with logo is publicly visible to anyone in CofounderOS. Only the most recent logo will be displayed, but anyone on your team can view older logos that you have previously uploaded.

Employee File Sharing

You can also share files privately with your team members as a part of CofounderOS HRIS. At the bottom of the File Manager, every active team member has their own unique file sharing system visible to your managers and the employee.

Anyone with Manager permissions can see any file in the Employee File Sharing system. Any other permission below that level (User, Instructor, Mentor) will only be able to view the files that you've shared with them, or the ones that they have uploaded to you.

This feature makes it easy to manage sensitive documents like W-2s and W-4s, as well as providing your employees with a way to share, sign, and review employment agreements and other documents unique to them.

Terminated Employees and "No Access" Users

This feature is one of the few features still available to anyone that you have terminated, or employees that have the "No Access" permission inside your organization. Please feel free to use this system to provide access to required documents that your former employees may still need.

WARNING: If you terminate a user in CofounderOS, please mention that they should update their email address to a personal email address so that they can still receive a notification if you add a document to their Employee File Share.

If their account email is set to their business email address and you close that down when they leave your employ, the email notification will not be delivered.

Linking your bank account is one of the core requirements for long-term financial impact tracking required by the Federal government as a part of this accredited program. Our ESOs have to create an annual report showing their economic impact to the region through all the startups they support.

Before CofounderOS, this process was annoying for everyone involved and required ESOs to harass the founders about how much money they were making, jobs they had created, and put that into a report to send to the Federal Dept. of Labor.

With this system, by linking your company bank account, corporate credit cards, and any commercial loans you've secured, the aggregate financial impact data is automatically provided to your ESO and they can submit that to the government without having to track you down and pester you while you're trying to grow your business.

Benefits to you

The benefit to you is that with that bank account connection, we can help you streamline one of the most painful parts of running a business and make financial accounting significantly less painful. CofounderOS will quietly watch your account transactions and continually update your Revenues and Expenses and generate a real-time Profit and Loss (P&L) statement on your behalf.

We will also monitor for fraudulent activity and warn you whenever we detect a suspicious spending pattern. While most banks today monitor for this as well, our system can be tailored to your business and your specific risk profile.

We also help you analyze your growth operations to double down on your most effective sales and marketing strategies and increase your margins.

Another product available to some subscription packages is the "Recurring Expenses" monitor that will help you keep an eye on all the monthly subscriptions eating up your capital and cancel the services you no longer need.

Your company financial data is highly secured and stored in our CofounderOS database. It is encrypted on the server and is encrypted when transmitted from the database to your browser.

Anyone on your team with Founder or Manager permissions will have access to your bank account transactions, expenses, and marketing channels.

What can the ESO see?

If you have joined an Entrepreneur Support Organization and joined a program to receive startup support, CofounderOS shares the critical business information necessary for that ESO to provide support and mentorship to your growing business.

The ESO will be able to view your expense reports, sales forecasts, and will be able to see if you have (or have not) connected to your company bank account.

The ESO will NOT be able to view your bank account transactions or view your real-time spending and revenue generation information.

CofounderOS Team

In order to provide this service, a small number of individuals on the CofounderOS Engineering team have access to your transaction information in order to provide material support and service to your organization. This access is restricted inside Make Startups and all data access is logged for security audits.

Plaid, the bank account transaction data vendor we use, also has an End User Privacy Agreement governing who can view and interact with your data from their company.

CofounderOS knows that everyone on a team needs to keep an eye on different pieces of your business. To help with this, we've provided two separate Dashboard tools available to every member of your team to make business management run more efficiently.

User-Dashboard

The main dashboard is the User Dashboard (labeled as "My Dashboard" in the menu). This dashboard is unique to each member of your team and can be configured individually by each team member to meet their needs.

If the user has not configured a dashboard, they will see a series of red alerts every time they view that page indicating that they don't have a dashboard configured. They can either click the "Use Default Dashboard" button to set up one of the pre-built dashboard templates, or they can click the "Edit Dashboard" button to customize their dashboard setup.

Each dashboard consists of a selection of application widgets and the configuration of those widgets. Each widget has a different purpose and different configuration options available to tailor that widget to the user's specific needs.

For example, the Project Tracker widget requires the user to select the specific project that they want to monitor. Some widgets also allow the user to filter out information and only display a subset on the dashboard. A common example would be to filter project tasks to only show the tasks assigned to that individual and ignore the ones that are assigned to other members of the team.

Most widgets also include a strange "sizing" interface with three sliders. These sliders are a number from 3-12 and are listed Small, Medium, Large. Those three boxes control the size of each dashboard widget when the dashboard is viewed from various device sizes. Small is best described as being a mobile phone, Medium is most like a modern tablet, and Large is a desktop.

These size numbers form a 12-part grid. Selecting 3 will produce a very thin widget with 9 columns available for other widgets to the left and right of that row. Selecting 12 will take up the entire row and will not allow other widgets to sit in the same space.

Most widgets are pre-configured with a recommended size, but users are free to modify this based on whatever spacing they desire.

Shared Company Dashboard

The Shared Company Dashboard is a unique dashboard that is shared across all members of the company. This is useful for keeping your entire team focused on the same KPIs and keeping your company working on the problems with the largest impact.

Everyone on your team shares the same company dashboard, so be aware that any change made to that will be reflected across your entire organization.

In the CofounderOS Project Management tool, we built a mechanism to let you create a project template, complete with title, description, attached files, and pre-defined tasks. This system makes it easy to manage recurring projects and make sure that nothing slips through the cracks.

To create a new project template, click "Create Project" from the Project Management application. On the New Project form, fill out all the project information fields and select the "Create New Project Template" option before clicking the Create Project button at the bottom of the form.

Once created, the Project Template will look exactly like a normal project, but will have a TEMPLATE label at the top to denote that it's a special type of project.

Finish defining your full task list for that project and attach any necessary files. Once finished, your new template will show up on the Create Project form in the Project Templates list. Select the template you want to use and click the Load Template button. That will import all the information you've defined and allow you to change things like the Start Date and Due Date, and once created will automatically populate all of the tasks from the template into this new project.

You can edit a Template at any time to update your future projects to follow any required project changes. Templates are listed in the Projects list by selecting the "Templates" tab.

Use Case Suggestions

If your company has a complex sales process with a structured set of required steps, this Project Template system will suit your needs perfectly. This system was designed for managing Government Contract proposal projects and is extremely useful to keep your proposal team working on producing a winning contract bid.