Closing the books

Accounting, bookkeeping, audit and tax practices: 622 000 firms in Europe. What they all have in common is that they sell hours, and the hours worth selling are the ones a senior person spends being senior.

The trouble is how few of those hours there are in a week. Before anyone can be senior at anything, somebody has to reconcile the statement that does not match the ledger, produce a first version for the expert to argue with, and chase the client for the receipts that have been missing for three weeks. None of that is the work, all of it is required, and most of it lands on the person whose time is the most expensive in the building. Agents are unusually good here. For example, reading a year of bank lines and coming back with the six that do not reconcile. Producing a first draft of the working papers that is wrong in the ordinary ways, so the expert spends their hour correcting rather than starting. Asking the client for the missing document every Tuesday until it arrives, which no one enjoys doing and everyone forgets.

That being said, an accountant signs their work, and a signature is a promise that a person stands behind what is on the page. To that end, our embedding process for accounting and audit practices puts the person at the end of every chain. For example, your agent drafts and never sends. Everything it asserts is traceable back to the line it came from, so checking it is a matter of following a line rather than trusting a tone. And it works from a copy, so the file it read is the file that is still there afterwards.

If you sell your expertise by the hour, every hour an agent gives back is an hour you can sell. If you're interested in the advantages an agent can give your business, click here to let us know more about your business.