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What would truly keep you up at night is how many small/medium businesses still do stuff like this. One small business I have seen just has tonnes of word docu
by bArray 3y ago
What would truly keep you up at night is how many small/medium businesses still do stuff like this.
One small business I have seen just has tonnes of word documents sitting in a single folder, with a mix of customer details, invoices, etc. To write a new invoice they copy an old one, then change the details, save it with a new name with a "system" (that changed over the years).
Up until semi-recently I saw a small-medium sized business (hired quite a few people) that did all of their accounting _by hand_, for hundreds to thousands of transactions. They had an old lady that came in to manually run their accounts on a calculator and it took several days.
A small business I once dealt with had a small black book (A6?) that was all written in note form, scattered, not dated, random important scribbles everywhere, mix of cash and card (not documented) - it was a nightmare. Somehow they had a good reputation in the local area, but behind the scenes it was pure chaos.
- GiorgioG 3y agoI consulted for a Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliate (big health insurance group for our non-US readers) that used Excel spreadsheets for managing all their plans and driving their claims processing. This was a company that did 2+ billion dollars a year in business back in 2007. It was mind-boggling. They had a team of 20 people updating spreadsheets. Hopefully they've gotten their stuff together by now - but I doubt it. We tried to get them to buy a product data management suite (they were bad at building software in-house)...they finally agreed...then the recession hit, and they reversed course.
- didgetmaster 3y agoI can relate. I was building a new kind of data management system when I approached a small mortgage company to be one of my first customers. Startups will bend over backwards to get those first few customers on board, so I worked closely with them to show how my software could make their business run much smoother. They had a separate spreadsheet for every state (all 50 of them). Some states just had a small number of customers in them (e.g. Wyoming). Others had large numbers of customers (e.g. California). Their support team could only update one spreadsheet at a time. So adding a customer in Texas required locking that spreadsheet until the transaction was complete. Doing reports required compiling data from all the relevant spreadsheets. Queries that could be done on a relational database in under a second, took many minutes (or hours). I tried to show them how my system could easily load all their data and make everything work much more smoothly (and saving them hundreds of man-hours); but they just couldn't see the value of spending a few hundred dollars a year for a license for my software.
- zdragnar 3y agoI wonder if it wasn't the value (people-hours aren't hard to calculate) but a risk assessment. If their system has been working just fine, but the new system entailed major risks (startup going out of business, hosted off-site, backups not in their control, PII / security issues) the calculation gets a lot worse.
- zdragnar 3y agoI can confirm a large retail company in the US ran all of their inventory purchasing through an Excel file that was managed by a small (<10 people) group. They were bought out by an even bigger company a few years back, but they were managing to chug along until the mid 2010's at least.
- xp84 3y agoI suppose this makes me feel better about the clunky “enterprise” stuff that my former employer (another national retailer) used. I mean, at least it wasn’t just spreadsheets emailed around!
- deely3 3y agoWhat will be alternative and not-so-expensive solution? Is there a lot of easy to install, support, customize solutions, cheap to use oriented on a small businesses?
- pjc50 3y agoRound here it seems like Quickbooks is the default. They even advertise on TV.
- SpaceNoodled 3y agoSadly, that's an Intuit product.
- inversetelecine 3y agoand one that's filled with years of cruft with a subscription service tacked on but they don't really do anything and just milk it.
- xp84 3y agoDefinitely the “IBM” of small business though, as in you’ll never get fired for choosing it. (Although AWS took over that title for enterprise)
- ilaksh 3y agoMaybe Notion, Airtable, nocodb
- ddmitriev 3y agoWave (https://www.waveapps.com/ https://www.waveapps.com/) works well for me. Admittedly, I have not explored things like accrual accounting (I just do everything on a cash basis), so I don’t know how well this is supported, and I’m perplexed that there is no easy way to generate EBITDA reports from within Wave itself, but basic tracking of expenses and transfers across multiple vendors and accounts works smoothly. [Edit] Also, most CPAs I have talked with know and can integrate with Wave.
- reassembled 3y agoHey, that’s the same way my company wrote a ton of code in the past.
- mvandermeulen 3y agoI have colleagues still running on this code
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jellyfishbeaver 3y agoLarge/medium businesses, too. In finance, we receive countless reports from 3rd parties. I can't tell you how many of them still rely on person A to manually log into our FTP server at a specific time every day and drop an Excel file into a folder. Sometimes it goes on like this for years. I always wonder if that person ever gets sick.. goes on vacation..
- ecshafer 3y agoA scary amount of the finance world runs on batched csv and whatever those || column deliminited files are called, just being FTPd around, processed in batches. Which then trigger more FTP and more file processing.
- aezart 3y agoYeah, I've seen stuff like that in my role as a system integrator. We've built all these automated processes for transforming and moving data from system A to system B, but occasionally we learn about other teams who are using excel and VBA for everything. It's very strange.
- ghaff 3y agoA long ago company I worked for that subsequently went through a couple of acquisitions still basically had one person in finance somewhere who was basically who you contacted for anything related to our defined benefit pension. I assume the bus factor wasn't literally one as there were legally required annual statements etc. but I assume there would have been some manner of chaos if this person from a no longer existing company wasn't there one day. (About 7 years ago, the benefit administration--now a responsibility of Dell's--transitioned to one of the big benefit administration companies; OI expect the person who had been handling it retired.)
- xp84 3y agoI remember a friend whose company allegedly was putting money from their paycheck into some kind of retirement plan, but there was never any documentation showing where that money went. It was skettttttch