Can you make a list? OK, can you make two lists? This is all you need to be able to do to create detailed forecasts, management reports and useful infographics using cloud-based Virtual Chairman Accounts.
My accounts system was born in 2012 out of necessity. I was working on turning around a 40 year old manufacturing company with an appallingly configured software system. It had ended up so opaque and corrupt – not to mention the small matters of the system being so old it was out of licence and unsupported – that there was no upgrade/migration path.
So I took the company right back to basics and built a powerful spreadsheet-based accounts system which allowed my colleagues and me to review and manipulate the data into accurate, meaningful accounts and analysis.
The first implementation, the prototype, for what would become Virtual Chairman Accounts was a multi-million pound manufacturing company.
The second application was a dear friend’s garage business. A few years ago he asked me if I could help him work out how his company was doing. He had been trading for about seven years, had a part time bookkeeper who kept spreadsheet lists of income and expenditure. Once a year the accountant picked up the spreadsheets and piles of invoices and returned months later with a set of accounts to file at Companies House.
Like many people, my friend perceived the end of year accounts as an annual chore that came with the sting of a tax calculation. The year to which the accounts related was long gone and held little value to him. What he really, really wanted to know was how he was doing today, NOW.
I took his bookkeeper’s spreadsheets and fed them into Virtual Chairman Accounts. I showed him how it worked and he dismissed the bookkeeper because “it’s so quick and easy, I might as well do it myself”. Which he has done ever since – it takes only a few minutes every day or so. The cost of those minutes is, by any measure, insignificant but the information Virtual Chairman Accounts returns in the form of compiled P&L statements, graphs and other infographics answers all his questions. The moment he adds any income or expenditure everything updates which motivates him to ‘put in some invoices to see what happens’.
To liken it to a computer game is perhaps to trivialise the power of the system but the analogy is valid because when we play a game, any game, we instinctively try to beat our last score. The keenness to ‘put in invoices and see what happens’ evolves to deliberate, well-founded decisions that will cause a ‘higher score’. In the real world of running a business, that ‘score’ is the profit.
Virtual Chairman Accounts is easy to learn and fast to use. The speed obviously minimises bookkeeping time but there’s also an element of ‘pleasure you can’t measure’ …and that powerful chase-the-high-score motivation.
Users say things like “I prefer it because I can see how accounts work” and “It’s so simple!” Which, really, is how it should be. The speed and simplicity are important but there are now enough users for me to recognise a trend in their approach to accounts. Trepidation quickly gives way to some confidence in what they are achieving. For the first few days there may be some questions like “where does this go?” …and then there’s nothing for a few weeks. After that, the questions are about the business – not the software.
Virtual Chairman Accounts quickly become transparent, revealing the meaning of numbers …and so the serious game of growing the business has begun.
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