Patricia Barrios
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Patricia Barrios

Numbers, code and everything else.

I'm in Finance, code, photography and design. An entrepreneur since I was a kid. I write about digital businesses and about everything that makes me curious.

Who

I don't fit in a single label.

I started selling as a kid: cupcakes, silver earrings, cookies. As an adult I opened Tamarindo, a Latin café in the Netherlands. Along the way I trained in audit and worked as a financial controller and finance manager.

Today I write code, deploy my own tools and work with language models every day. And when I'm not, I'm behind a camera, designing something, or reading about why humans do what we do.

Retrato de Patricia Barrios, sonriendo, con blazer blanco
Patricia Barrios Finance, code and AI. Entrepreneur. Trained in audit · UT Austin McCombs (code, data and AI) LinkedIn →

  1. Entrepreneur as a kid

    Cupcakes, silver earrings, cookies

  2. Finance

    Audit, financial controller, finance manager

  3. Tamarindo

    A Latin café in the Netherlands

  4. Code, data and AI

    UT Austin McCombs

  5. IDEA and this site

    My own practice, and writing

Curiosities

What moves me when there are no numbers involved.

Photography and design

Looking closely, framing, deciding what to leave out.

Anthropology and sociology

Why we organise ourselves the way we do, money included.

Technology

Building my own tools instead of waiting for someone else to.

The book Sapiens Yuval Noah Harari
The novel One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez
Now

What I'm doing now.

Not a CV. A snapshot of this month. Updated September 2026.

  • Work I run IDEA, an accounting practice for founders, freelancers and digital businesses in the Netherlands.
  • Building A compliance back office for coaches, solopreneurs and tech founders.
  • Writing The first essays. Coming here soon.
Questions

Open questions.

Things I can't fully answer yet. Some turn into essays; others keep going round.

Money and structure

  • When should a freelancer stop being a ZZP and set up a B.V.?

    Writing about this

  • Why does almost nobody look at the real margin of a business that gets paid through Stripe?

    Open

  • What does skipping the accounting foundations really cost when you start?

    Open

AI

  • If AI does the accounting, who answers when something goes wrong?

    Writing about this

  • How do you account for a business whose biggest cost is tokens?

    Open

  • Who owns the intellectual property of what a language model creates?

    Open

Building from Europe

  • Why is selling to other EU countries still so complicated for a solopreneur?

    Open

  • What does an accountant learn when she starts coding her own tools?

    Open

Got a question that belongs here? Write to me

Coming

Nothing published yet. Here's what's coming.

  • Podcast

    Conversations about building digital businesses from Europe, money included, no gloss.

  • Essays

    Long-form on structure, tax, intellectual property, and what happens when AI enters the picture.

  • Video

    The same, with the screen shared: tools, processes, things I build.

Separately

I also run IDEA, an accounting practice for founders, freelancers and digital businesses in the Netherlands. That's separate work, and it lives elsewhere.

Go to IDEA
Contact

If you want to write to me