I don't mean to push myself forward on this, but i did co-author a how-to-do-it book on precisely this topic: The Trusted Advisor (Free Press, 2000.) It's available from Amazon and, as they say, fine bookstores everywhere.
Dennis Howlett
· 3 years ago
Alastair: the ability of some folk to suspend belief in the face of absurdity never fails to amaze me. David: you've just solved my layover problem at Newark this coming October. Thank you. I'd quite forgotten I've watched some of David's videos on the topic...so nothing original from me then :)
Emily Coltman
· 3 years ago
I seem to remember David Carter writing about this on AccWeb a while back - saying that when helping a client to choose software, accountants should bear in mind:
1) The client's capabilities - is he/she a trained bookkeeper, has he/she ever used software before, how computer literate is he/she? For example, I offered More to one client this week, but she doesn't want to use the Internet. Software and client not a good match there then.
2) The needs of the business - do they really need a full 3-ledger system or would a cashbook do the job?
M
Malcolm McLelland
· 3 years ago
Dennis: I think your final three paragraphs are quite insightful, and each is probably worth an entire article. As usual I agree pretty much completely with you, I'm just pessimistic that a critical mass of accountants would actually understand the issues. You say somewhere on your website that philosophy of science continues to be important in what you do; maybe the problem is that accountants don't have a good grip on philosophy of science, epistemology, etc. Most accountants I know would look at that last sentence, call me an arrogant academic asshole, and say that they live in the real world and, therefore, don't need to know anything about such things. I'm pretty sure they're wrong: We all need to know how we know what we Know.
One thing that always occurs to me whenever I think about accountants, accounting software developers, etc. is the question, What kind of actual market research do they do? How do they "know" what clients/customers actually want (i.e., how do they know what they Know)? It seems marketing professionals have pretty clear ideas about how to develop such knowledge. The example that always comes to my mind is Marriott Courtyards. As I understand it, Marriott developed a very large survey dataset from business and recreational travelers with the objective of finding out *what combination of features/benefits/prices* the broad cross-section of travelers actually said they wanted. (They used "conjoint analysis" to estimate this; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjoint_analysis_... .) Marriott then designed their Marriott Courtyards chain directly from the analysis, and it seems the chain is a direct hit.
So ... why haven't accounting software developers actually done something like Marriott did? They could develop a large dataset of the stated features/benefits/price preferences of both entrepreneurs and their accountants, analyze it, and actually Know Something about what that particular market wants. I'm not saying it would be easy, but it is feasible. Perhaps the explanation for why it's not done is that the large software houses have the (marketing) research money, but don't care because their in a lucrative oligopoly; the small software houses care a lot but don't have the time or money to find out. Maybe there would be some way to put together a consortium of smaller accounting software houses to share the cost of Knowing What SMBs and Their Accountants Actually Want?
All Comments
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-23443...
David: you've just solved my layover problem at Newark this coming October. Thank you. I'd quite forgotten I've watched some of David's videos on the topic...so nothing original from me then :)
1) The client's capabilities - is he/she a trained bookkeeper, has he/she ever used software before, how computer literate is he/she? For example, I offered More to one client this week, but she doesn't want to use the Internet. Software and client not a good match there then.
2) The needs of the business - do they really need a full 3-ledger system or would a cashbook do the job?
M
One thing that always occurs to me whenever I think about accountants, accounting software developers, etc. is the question, What kind of actual market research do they do? How do they "know" what clients/customers actually want (i.e., how do they know what they Know)? It seems marketing professionals have pretty clear ideas about how to develop such knowledge. The example that always comes to my mind is Marriott Courtyards. As I understand it, Marriott developed a very large survey dataset from business and recreational travelers with the objective of finding out *what combination of features/benefits/prices* the broad cross-section of travelers actually said they wanted. (They used "conjoint analysis" to estimate this; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjoint_analysis_... .) Marriott then designed their Marriott Courtyards chain directly from the analysis, and it seems the chain is a direct hit.
So ... why haven't accounting software developers actually done something like Marriott did? They could develop a large dataset of the stated features/benefits/price preferences of both entrepreneurs and their accountants, analyze it, and actually Know Something about what that particular market wants. I'm not saying it would be easy, but it is feasible. Perhaps the explanation for why it's not done is that the large software houses have the (marketing) research money, but don't care because their in a lucrative oligopoly; the small software houses care a lot but don't have the time or money to find out. Maybe there would be some way to put together a consortium of smaller accounting software houses to share the cost of Knowing What SMBs and Their Accountants Actually Want?