Onchain businesses can start by accident. You go to a hackathon. You build a trading bot. You write a v4 hook. There’s no incorporation moment, and what you launched on a Monday can have thousands of transactions to account for by Friday.
You could launch from a private key and a single wallet, and for a while that’s enough. Payments go out, tokens come in, and contractors are paid from wherever the funds happen to sit. Then the year ends, and you spend weeks reconstructing it one transaction at a time for an accountant who wasn’t in the room.
The contracts that move the money were built to pay people, not to explain themselves. The ledger that has to explain them gets built months later, by someone who wasn’t there when the transactions happened. Closing that distance takes work at both ends:
- The infrastructure the money runs through
- The accounting that has to make sense of it
You could use a wallet meant for meme coin trading to run your business, or you could use a wallet that’s purpose built for running it.
The work begins with a few habits: organizing funds by purpose, recording the context of each payment, and involving an accountant early. Built into everyday operations, these habits help the books keep pace as the business grows.
Splits and Darien are working together to allow your books to take shape alongside your business. Splits brings treasury, payments, and transaction records into one place. Darien builds the monthly close and tax return from those records.
Here’s how it works in practice.
Build where the books already exist
When operations account for themselves, the books fall out of the day’s work without anyone going back for them. The treasury has a structure you could explain to a stranger. Every payment carries a descriptor and the cost basis is known the day an asset arrives, not estimated the day it leaves. Your accountant can read the ledger on a Tuesday in June, and the close takes days instead of weeks.
Getting there takes three habits, formed early and maintained:
1. Set up before you transact
Structure is documentation. A treasury that lives in one wallet has no story to tell. One split by purpose, with a named wallet for operating funds, another for contractor payments, and another for what you intend to hold. Splits is built around this:
- Separate wallets by purpose under one roof
- Easily add additional sub-wallets as your business grows.
- Each wallet has a purpose and corresponding signers.
- Give your accountant read access on day one
Splits’ quick-start guide to simplifying your onchain operations walks through this setup step by step.
2. Record as it happens
Attach descriptions immediately. A transaction is easiest to describe at the moment it occurs and hardest a year later. Create a memo and a tag on every payment: who it went to, what it was for, and which entity it belongs to.
In Splits:
- The memo sit on the transaction itself, and cost basis is tracked per token from the moment it lands.
- The record is made once at the source instead of rebuilt later from a block explorer.
- A swap is treated as what it is, the disposal of one asset and the acquisition of another at that day’s price
Completed in the moment, this is seconds of work. Done at year end, it becomes the entire project.
3. Ask before the close
The painful questions are the ones nobody asks in advance.
- Which wallets belong to the entity, and which belong to you?
- What basis method does the record actually support?
- Is a wallet history still enough, or has the business quietly outgrown it and started needing a subledger?
- Which of the year’s inflows are income, which are capital, and which are neither?
Every question is easier and cheaper to answer in October than in March. Most of the raw material already sits in Splits’ transaction reports and open lots. The habit is asking for it early.
The question to ask
Before the next payment goes out, ask yourself one question:
If my accountant closed last month from my wallet activity alone, would they need to ask me anything?
If the answer is no, the habits are in place. If it’s yes, a gap is present and it widens with every transaction until someone sits down in January to reconstruct the year. Closing correctly requires operations that carry their own context and an accountant who works from those records rather than around them.
Both halves already exist.
Splits carries the operations.
Darien carries the close.
Get started
Splits
- Wallets with a dedicated purpose
- A memo on every payment
- Cost basis tracked from the moment an asset lands
- Read access for your accountant from day one
Darien
- A monthly close built from those records rather than around them
- A basis method the record can support, applied the same way across every wallet
- The judgment on when a wallet history stops being enough and a subledger starts
- A return filed from the same ledger the business runs on
Disclaimer: This piece is educational and isn’t tax, legal, or accounting advice for any specific situation. Splits is a software company, not an accounting firm.
