The Story
Meet Dave. Dave works at a family-owned construction company that’s been “going digital” for roughly the same amount of time that people have been promising flying cars.
Which is to say: it’s aspirational.
His office features a printer that sounds like it’s choking on its own toner and a filing cabinet that might contain the original plans for the pyramids.
Every month, Dave performs what he calls “The Great Balancing Act” — though it’s less Cirque du Soleil than CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. The ledger must balance. The books must close. The numbers must add up to zero, because zero is the holy grail of accounting.
But zero is a tough mistress.
Dave squints at income and expenses. He enters them line by line into a spreadsheet that crashes if you breathe on it wrong. Then he cross-references against bank statements that arrive in PDF format — which Excel treats like a suggestion rather than data.
Hours pass. Coffee goes cold. “Just 12.50 off,” Dave mutters, but 12.50 might as well be 125,000 when you’re adding and subtracting millions.
But Dave is a master. An acrobat. He’ll sleep on it and redo it in the morning.
The solution
- Using people to enter data and then find and correct the mistakes is so last century
- We had SaaS solutions that parse invoices and statements for dimes and pennies for years
- You can do it in-house now if you put your mind to it
- Once you know your data is valid you can dig the outliers out.
- Always start small, and build trust on your way up!