I had an interesting meeting with our
friends at Intuit last week, a company probably best known for its Quickbooks
range of accounting software. But as well as producing financial software for
small businesses, it also provides free small business training through its
Financial Fitness workshops programme. It was this latter activity and its
support for Start-Up Loans that led to our meeting.
I was pretty impressed by the products I
saw and by the ways in which different financial activities can be integrated
and monitored over a range of mobile devices as well as traditional Pcs, but I
was staggered by a statistic they shared with me. I'm well aware of the 'lies,
damned lies, and statistics' notion but – even if the detail is over-stated
- it's still incredible. I was told that 66% of businesses with up to 15
employees use no software at all to manage their accounts, either relying on an
accountant to periodically pull together numbers from a pile of abstract pieces
of paper and records, or simply muddling through with a combination of paper
and/or spreadsheets.
I've been preparing for a presentation at
the Milton Keynes Business Expo 3.0 Exhibition on 8 March where I'm addressing
the topic 'Cashflow is King – Ten Top Tips', and this has made me think.
Managing a business means knowing its position at any particular point in time.
With a diverse range of simple and inexpensive tools available from a host of
different suppliers that allow for the production of invoices, recording of
expenditure, taking of payments, summarising outstanding debts, and a great
deal more besides, you have to ask why any business, however small, would not
use something so obvious and instantly available to make its life easier. I clearly
knew there'd be a proportion of businesses that manage without any software or
specific credit management tools but 66% is a real concern. I think I have just
found an eleventh tip…!
No comments:
Post a Comment