We all know that Luca Pacioli codified the concept of double entry book-keeping in the 15th century and more than 500+ years later, we’re still living with that legacy. I’ve long felt this was an out-dated and useless tool for managing a business. I just didn’t have a better way of doing things.
Like the good accountant I used to be, I’d cobble figures together, present balance sheets and P&L accounts. I’d then waste a good hour of my time and my client’s money explaining the gobbledy gook I’d churned out. From time to time, I experimented with pie charts and graphs as an alternative way of presenting the figures. That kind of worked. The real problem is that nothing I produced was remotely relevant to what clients wanted. The only real reason for expending the time and energy on these useless documents was to satisfy the needs of regulators. The same holds true today. Except that is changing.
When I was shown FreeAgent for the first time, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Here, for the first time is a system that does what customers want. It gives customers exactly what they need in a language they understand in a straightforward, no-nonsense fashion.
The last couple of months, I’ve been showing it to a variety of people. One of them is Guy Dickinson. I met him in July at a London Wiki Wednesday event. He’d heard me speak about FreeAgent at an earlier LWW event and joined the beta. At the time, he was making ready to pay someone to get his plastic bag data into FreeAgent and was enthusiastic about what he’d seen. Recently, he wrote:
FreeAgent Central is the financial management app that I’d almost given up waiting for. At last someone’s had the balls, skill and accounting insight to build an online app that makes it really simple to handle my business’s finances.
Yeah, I know, a big part of running a business is about managing finances, but I’m too busy selling, working with customers, travelling, trying to think of new ideas and keeping up with umpteen other things in my business to obsess over the finances. Yet, of course, I worry about my finances, and FreeAgent Central has given me back a complete sense of control over this neglected part of my business.
It’s made me feel smart, not stupid, about my company’s finances. I can pull up quick dashboard reports of my cashflow, generate VAT returns in minutes, not hours, and see exactly how much tax I should be expecting to pay this year.
We never touched the stuff he wrote. Don’t believe me? Go ask him yourself.
Last month Ed Molyneux and I visited a practice with 8,000+ clients. I met the IT guy. This is usually a bad idea because IT people don’t have a great reputation for innovation. He said something we already know:
You’re both a threat and an opportunity.
We’ll be having a second meeting with the senior partner and a couple of other folk. Who knows – a deal might come out of it. If it does, then we will have taken the first big step to disrupting the SMB market. We’re already taking little steps with close on 300 beta users. We’re not spending a penny on marketing other than a little travel. A colleague in the US believes it could do very well there in certain segments. We’ll see. But we’re not the only ones who are thinking differently.
Later today, I’ll be writing about Workday. Never heard of them? OK – they’re a US saas vendor that is turning the accounting model inside out for what we would call mid-market companies. They have a big announcement.
Last week I had a conversation with one of their people – someone I know from the old PeopleSoft days. As he described what they’re doing, I became genuinely excited. Why? Because he was describing exactly how FreeAgent has evolved. We’re in very different markets so there’s no competition. But it sure helps when someone else validates your thinking.
Who knows but in a couple of years, Pacioli may, at last be buried. As a Renaissance man, I’m sure he would approve.
