Clear communication is one of the key issues when running your business successfully. It is, of course, important in marketing and sales but also with administrational relationships. I just had a meeting with a micro entrepreneur from Eastern Europe who was disappointed with his accountant. He was saying that there were a lot of errors in his books and due to that he had paid too much VAT. I am used to hearing a lot of this kind of talking from the business owners who are generally frustrated to pay different kind of taxes and social payments. However, this gentleman was so anxious about the case that it attracted my interest to hear what kind of problems there had been. He showed me the cash sales reports and we compared the totals with the revenues in the Income Statement. Quite soon it was figured out that there had been confusion with the monthly sales and the accumulated sales, which mean the year-to-date sales from the beginning of the year to the end of the current month. Thus after a few months the sales in the books were already more than doubled from the actual. Consequently, too much VAT had been reported.

Then we discussed how this is possible. The accountant had a long experience, some authorization letters below the name and worked for a proper accounting company. It was obvious that the problem was a communication problem, not from the lack of professional skills. As seen in this case, the communication between the entrepreneur and the accountant needs to be very exact and detailed OR the process needs to be formed so that misunderstandings can be avoided. In this particular case, the foreign language and background played a certain role since the accounting company was not accustomed to the customers with an international background.

Based on this story I was once again ensured that we are on a right track with Digibalance’s AutoAccount service. The whole service supply is built in English and all the possible phases are automated or planned to avoid human errors.

The role of the accountants is more like controlling the books not entering data from unclear papers. The key financials can even be sent directly to the customer’s phone.

The outcome of this conversation with the entrepreneur was that we have one more satisfied AutoAccount customer!

The author is Mikko Ilves, the Chairman of the Board at Digibalance Limited