Fondo Reference Architecture

Overview

Reference architecture for a startup's financial operations with Fondo at the center, connecting payroll, banking, payments, and internal reporting.

Prerequisites

• A data-flow inventory, authorized business purpose, system owners, access/retention policy, and professional-review boundary.
• Separate scoped identities for data sources, processing, storage, reporting, and support, plus synthetic integration fixtures.

Instructions

1. Enforce field allowlists, access checks, encryption, and retention requirements at every financial-data boundary.
2. Keep financial/tax conclusions under the designated finance professional’s review; integrations may prepare evidence but not replace that review.
3. Use idempotent queues, redacted telemetry, staged promotion, and a correction/rollback path for each downstream consumer.

Output

Maintain an architecture record describing sources, trust boundaries, approved destinations, access/retention controls, owners, professional-review points, and recovery mechanisms. Do not include finance data or secrets.

Error Handling

• Quarantine unknown fields, unapproved destinations, and reconciliation mismatches for finance review.
• Disable unsafe consumers and preserve only redacted evidence during recovery.
• Restore the prior mapping/configuration before replaying any financial workflow.

Examples

Route a fictional aggregate expense event through an approved staging pipeline, deny an unapproved reporting consumer, and verify a duplicate event is suppressed. Record only the opaque event ID and aggregate outcome.

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                     Data Sources                         │
├──────────┬──────────┬──────────┬──────────┬─────────────┤
│  Mercury │  Gusto   │  Stripe  │  Brex    │  AWS/GCP    │
│  Banking │  Payroll │  Revenue │  Expense │  Cloud      │
├──────────┴──────────┴──────────┴──────────┴─────────────┤
│              Plaid / OAuth Connections                    │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                          │
│                   FONDO PLATFORM                         │
│  ┌──────────┐  ┌──────────┐  ┌────────────────┐        │
│  │ Monthly  │  │ Tax      │  │ R&D Tax Credit │        │
│  │ Close    │  │ Filing   │  │ Study (6765)   │        │
│  └──────────┘  └──────────┘  └────────────────┘        │
│                                                          │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                     Outputs                              │
├──────────┬──────────┬──────────┬────────────────────────┤
│  P&L     │  Balance │  Cash    │  R&D Credit            │
│  Report  │  Sheet   │  Flow    │  Certificate           │
├──────────┴──────────┴──────────┴────────────────────────┤
│              Internal Dashboard (optional)                │
│  Revenue metrics │ Burn rate │ Runway │ Board deck       │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Recommended Stack

Category	Tool	Why
Banking	Mercury or SVB	Startup-friendly, API access, Plaid compatible
Payroll	Gusto	Best startup payroll, Fondo integration
Revenue	Stripe	Standard payments, clean webhooks
Expenses	Brex or Ramp	Auto-receipt capture, categorization
Bookkeeping	Fondo	Automated, CPA-managed
Tax Filing	Fondo (TaxPass)	Bundled with bookkeeping
R&D Credits	Fondo	Integrated with bookkeeping data
Cap Table	Carta or Pulley	Equity management
Board Reporting	Fondo exports + internal dashboard	Custom metrics

Data Flow

1. Transactions flow from banks/cards/payroll into Fondo via Plaid/OAuth
2. Fondo CPA team categorizes and reconciles monthly
3. Financial statements generated and delivered to Dashboard
4. R&D credit study prepared annually from same data
5. Tax returns filed using reconciled data

Resources

• Fondo
• Mercury
• Gusto

Next Steps

Start with fondo-install-auth to set up your Fondo account.