The road to better business management (and world peace) starts here (with easier reconciliation)

 

I've been reading a really interesting article called "Why Customers Will Pay You to Restrain Them". It talks about how sometimes some of us need some help to help ourselves. and how great if would be if businesses would take initiative and help their customers with doing the stuff they need (but hate) to do.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1209261/w...-restrain-them (this was written by the same guys that wrote "Made to stick" so well worth reading.)

The first thing the poped to my mind when reading this article was "bank reconcilation" - this is the single most important part of business bookkeeping and probably the best thing any business owner can do to improve his business financial managment.

Although I develop accounting software, I still hate doing my books, and postpone it to the last minute. In fact most of the better features in Nominal (PayPal integration, Bank reconciliation, online banking) were developed to assist my lazy self in the same process.

So here is an idea, what if I could "make" my customers use Nominal at least once a week to reconcile their bank accounts, that would have them "on top" of their business status at all times and make things like BAS a breeze !

Think about it - most businesses HATE doing their books with a passion and like a 2nd grade student will postpone all work to the absolute last minute (and beyond)

  • The immidiate affect will be time saving - easier bank reconcilation will take less time.
  • The next affect will be - more frequent reconcilation - since the devil will not be so bad we can assume our business owners will tend to do it more frequently
  • The next affect will be - more accurate recordsd - when we reconcile our bank records (or PayPal or other accounts) more frequently they will contain less errors and be more accurate
  • The next affect will be - better reporting - when the records are up to date and more accuarte the reports will be better and easier to comprehend
  • The next affect will be - reporting to goverment will be made easier by making use of our accurate records to submit BAS at a click of a button (using SBR for example)
  • The next affect will be - better understanding of the business, when the records are up to date and the reports are clear, better understanding will naturally evolve
  • The next affect will be - better planning and better chances of reaching your business goals - which is only possible if you have a good understanding of your business financials.
  • The next affect will be - more time to go fishing or contemplate things like world peace. 

I am not sure the logic that I used to get to that last point is sound :-) but everything else can more or less happen.

We know that this is a REAL issue for businesses and we KNOW that we can do better, what we need to do is look at this basic process, tear is apart and re-build it using the minimum essentials - which will hopefully streamline it enough to make it easier for our small business owners to use.

Over the next couple of weeks I will try to review some of the other popular systems and share the results with you. Hopefully we can identify some aspects of bank reconcilation where we can make some improvments.

 

 

 

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