4 ms·

The benefits of open book finances is that everyone is aware of how well/bad the company is doing. Not the usual cloak and dagger hush hush style, where no-one

by flurdy 14y ago

The benefits of open book finances is that everyone is aware of how well/bad the company is doing. Not the usual cloak and dagger hush hush style, where no-one is aware they may actually be close to bankruptcy or that the actual money earner is product B not the glorified Product "Novergoingtowork". Or that hardware cost was 1% of expenditure while salaries was 70% of which pointless meetings accounted for 30%... Good idea. Open and honesty prevails. Now who dares opening their books publicly? To their customers and competitors...

sophacles 14y ago
Interesting thought experiment. Say I open the company books, maybe with some simple replacement -- "dev1" instead of "jane doe" and so on, as well as "vendorN", "customerN", ", etc., and maybe some sanitizing of the notes about the expenditures, (e.g. 10 servers instead of "inventory spec: 10 servers, cpu:x, mem:y"). What does that get me? * Vendors can come to me and say "look you spend this much, we can cut that by 20%" * customers relying on me can see I won't be going out of business soon (hopefully), and put more faith and $ into my product * customers curious about why it costs so much to do $foo, can see the expenses. * forces you to not over-aggrandize yourself * others? (please chime in) How does it hurt me? * employee poaching becomes easier * customers can start using this to lower thier costs and eat away at your margin * a bad week/month can scare away customers * vendors may try to collude and gouge you * misunderstandings from the peanut gallery may get you a bad rep So the single best feature I see from doing it, compared to the risks, is vendor competition becomes easier. A question since I don't know - is there a small business/startup oriented RFP site/service that gets you the same sort of competition amongst vendors?

by flurdy 14y ago

sophacles 14y ago

Interesting thought experiment. Say I open the company books, maybe with some simple replacement -- "dev1" instead of "jane doe" and so on, as well as "vendorN", "customerN", ", etc., and maybe some sanitizing of the notes about the expenditures, (e.g. 10 servers instead of "inventory spec: 10 servers, cpu:x, mem:y"). What does that get me? * Vendors can come to me and say "look you spend this much, we can cut that by 20%" * customers relying on me can see I won't be going out of business soon (hopefully), and put more faith and $ into my product * customers curious about why it costs so much to do $foo, can see the expenses. * forces you to not over-aggrandize yourself * others? (please chime in) How does it hurt me? * employee poaching becomes easier * customers can start using this to lower thier costs and eat away at your margin * a bad week/month can scare away customers * vendors may try to collude and gouge you * misunderstandings from the peanut gallery may get you a bad rep So the single best feature I see from doing it, compared to the risks, is vendor competition becomes easier. A question since I don't know - is there a small business/startup oriented RFP site/service that gets you the same sort of competition amongst vendors?