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You have to take your hat off to Chris Poll. Popping up as founder, and chairman, of the Doing Business Together bandwagon is a masterstroke of marketing given that no mention is made, certainly not amongst the acres of publicity material and quotes from the great and the good, about the fact that all of what is proposed can only happen employing the software that Chris has developed: and of course if it works.
I intend no disrespect to any of those involved in what is a laudable movement, indeed, I count many of them as friends and cannot fault what they say but let us take a look at business.
I well remember my early days as a banker visiting businesses on site and extolling the virtues of good bookkeeping. I was lucky that my customers smiled indulgently and, having crossed the divide to found and run a business, wince at the memory. Like a novice Roman Catholic priest advising married couples on sex and relationships, the words in the good book make for great reading, but real life is somewhat different.
Accountancy, for all of its importance to the successful business, is like the dung cart that follows the Lord Mayor’s Show. It is the essential tidying up after a great deal of effort by others.
Let us take Chris Poll. I have no doubt that his accountancy standards will be of the highest order but long before they became relevant he was putting an immense effort into developing the Credit Pal software that is the fulcrum of the whole Doing Business Together campaign. The system uploads data from accountancy packages, such as Sage, on a real time basis so that banks, credit insurers, suppliers, no doubt HMRC too, can be persuaded they know what is going on all of the time with any business. The theory is that this, dare I say, Big Brother world will make credit, and credit insurance, more readily available: the publicity would have you believe that SMEs will take a great leap forward as a result. Forgive me if I raise a few points.
Obviously a host of entities supplied by SMEs will demand the same information on
Business Money
the pretext of ensuring the stability of their sources. Will this not create a horde of mini Tescos? Might this entail too much access to information regarding profits and margins so as a good year-end looms the customer starts demanding rebates? Or will HMRC be demanding monthly
corporation tax payments based upon arbitrary assessments linked to the numbers to which it has access? It has only just been slapped down on the notion of employers paying it the gross salary roll each month so it could deduct what it wants and pay out the net salaries. Might we see companies suddenly launching a couple of subsidiaries, maybe with good old fashioned pen and ink records, with the rubbish in, rubbish out, syndrome encouraged so that those parties with their nose deep into the financial affairs of a company are only told what they want to hear?
Business is about the right environment to encourage the entrepreneur, it is about products, sales, people, investment, and above all, personal commitment. SME owners, and their teams, put in hours, achieve productivity levels, have an absenteeism avoidance philosophy, all of which would have your average civil servant laid low with the vapours.
And real time accounting has demonstrated huge benefits in the Vision Critical software that made Close Invoice Finance’s I-Deal product such a success. But Close’s clients have first to have a product or service that is marketable, and then sell it. Then the bean counters can get busy.
Of the ranks of commentators that Chris
Poll succeeded in lining up to endorse his product, only Steve Pateman used the word relationship and here is the crux of business finance matters. Dave Thomson may have the best management information linked product in company finance in the UK. But Close would not touch that business with a bargepole were Dave not happy with the people with whom he is dealing. That is how you do business together.
People first: bean counting bringing up the rear. Editor
November/December 2010 1
Doing bean counting together
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