Burgers and bookkeeping

Most businesses are in control of how they provide products or services to their customers.

A McDonald’s burger is a McDonald’s burger. It’s done the same way, every time. When you get a flight you turn up at the airport, do check in, go through security and passport control, sit in your selected seat and follow the process. In a restaurant you are greeted, shown to your table, choose your food, it arrives, you eat, you leave.

McDonald’s is the extreme example of a business owning and controlling the process but most businesses do the same, to some degree.

Except, perhaps accountants. All our clients are different it seems. Some provide their records to us in a carrier bag, some in shiny folders in monthly batches, some via email or Dropbox, some summarised on Excel spreadsheets, some on accounting software. Some tidy and reconciled, many not.

So often we work in different ways and using a different process for different clients. That’s a challenge because we need to adapt to each client and have a good working knowledge of multiple accounting systems. ‘That’s what our clients want’, many accountants would say. Maybe, but it’s not terribly efficient and maybe our clients ‘Don’t know what they don’t know’

I’m happy to admit that we have followed what we believed to be the ‘client friendly’ method. However the records are presented, we will find a way of coping with it.

I believe now that things have moved on and we are not acting in the client’s interest if we do not direct the process more than we have in the past. If we can scan receipts, quickly and easily why would we not encourage our clients to do this to save time and simplify the process? If we can use software which downloads the bank feed and automatically matches invoices to payments and receipts, why wouldn’t we take advantage of that? And why would we not use intuitive dashboards rather than paper-based or pdf reports?

Some firms have taken this on board such that they work with a single accounting package with associated apps and they own and control the accounting process with their clients, including doing the bookkeeping in most cases. They get huge efficiencies and economies of scale which they can pass onto clients in terms of improved services and ‘value-adding’ advisory support.

We may not go quite to the extent of prescribing a single accounting system but I do believe standardising how we receive records from our clients and our own internal processes is beneficial for us and our clients.

Accountancy may be different from burgers in a bun but we can learn a lot about consistency, value and service from Ray Kroc and his empire.

www.base52.co.uk