

Refusing administrative minutiae - wlll
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3081-refusing-administrative-minutiae

======
rwmj
Not so long ago, people had secretaries. In fact, my father had a secretary
and it wasn't unusual at the time, and he wasn't paid any more than me. I'm
not suggesting we bring back secretaries.

There's surely an opportunity here for a start-up with an AI background to
analyze what I'm doing at any moment in time and ...

(a) track what I'm doing

(b) help me (intelligently, not clippy)

(c) schedule my time

(d) suggest improvements (it's time for your run!)

This would have to be private software under my control, but if I give you
that, you are free to look at everything I do (type, view), use the webcam to
see what I'm doing, even follow my cellphone around.

~~~
rmc
_Not so long ago, people had secretaries. In fact, my father had a secretary
and it wasn't unusual at the time, and he wasn't paid any more than me_

Women were not able to avail of all the job opportunities they are now, so
their labour was cheap. Now they have better job prospects.

~~~
Duff
Nah, I'd say it has more to do with MS Office eliminating the need for typists
in 1990 and companies replacing the personnel cost with a smaller licensing
cost.

I have a secretary. She is an awesome resource that helps my whole team get
more done. Typically, they are folks with humanities degrees who don't want to
teach. Where I am, they tend to last about 3-4 years, than transition to
project management type roles. They excel there, because after a couple of
years tracking down stuff.

------
maukdaddy
A lot of naïvety in this post. Expense tracking sucks, but there are IRS
regulations that both employees (contractors included) and businesses must
follow.

<http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc511.html>

~~~
patio11
You have quite a bit of latitude in how high ceremony your expense tracking
needs to be, though. "CC hotel / travel expenses to our standard address, put
everything on the company card" is likely adequate, as long as there's a
contemporaneous record of business travel. Many places keep that as a formal
log book, but since the IRS is pretty much ambivalent about the exact form of
your records as long as they capture the important stuff, a Google Calendar
entry with "Bob speaking at $FOO_CONF in Boston 3/14" probably suffices. In
the event of an audit, you'll be asked to provide supporting documentation
(again, wide latitude) of a small sampling of those expenses, because they
have no more desire to read five thousand pages of records than you do to
write them. If you're unable to provide those records, but don't strike the
examiner as actively malicious, they'll say "Alright, there's two ways I can
do this. My book says we think you have about $X of legit deductions for this
category, which is $Y less than you're claiming. Pay $Y plus our below market
interest rate for making an honest mistake. Otherwise, you and I get to do
things line by line, and I'm going to suddenly get _very_ picky. Which would
you prefer?"

There's also a certain element of "In the vanishingly unlikely event the IRS
audited us, disallowed _every_ expense our employees charged in the year, and
then charged taxes on those plus the standard penalty interest, that wouldn't
cost us enough for us to even notice it."

~~~
Kynlyn
Spoken like someone who hasn't undergone an IRS audit.

While I agree with David for the most part, his cavalier attitude of "Well, if
we get audited it will be cheaper than the cost of tracking shit" is naive.
Once he goes through an IRS audit, where they turn everything upside down and
consume hundreds and hundreds of hours of time then he might change his
attitude of the cost of an IRS audit. They are not nearly as cheap or
insignificant as he makes it out to be.

~~~
onemoreact
That depends, my aunt was audited and ended-up with close to a million dollar
refund. Here attitude had long been, paying a little extra in taxes is worth
not keeping track of every expense. When your actually making real money
tracking every lunch has a minimal ROI.

PS: She did still took many large deductions and had reasonable records, she
just played it safe when submitting her taxes.

~~~
Duff
Good point, but if you're too cool to keep receipts, you're probably being a
cowboy in other areas of business.

------
ANH
In my experience with these minutiae, there is usually additional hidden
overhead. Not only do I have a client that requires time recorded daily in
15-minute increments, but they are locked into a system (Deltek) that is
incompatible with Google Chrome, forcing ~1/3 of users to switch browsers for
this already annoying task. And users must enter login information twice --
once to login to the portal, another for the timekeeping system. And it's been
that way for over two years.

There is an opportunity here for those who can break into the consciousness of
enterprise Accounting people.

~~~
j45
I've integrated enterprise and mid-size accounting systems over the past 15
years. I also have had to run a small consulting shop answering this issue. I
think I have something that really works well, but I didn't think anyone else
needed it.

I'd like to talk to you more about what you think a solution should look like
(I've built, torn down and rebuilt solutions for this space). Mind getting in
touch by email?

------
j45
Interesting. I'm tempted to want to take this post with a grain of salt.

I systemize and automate businesses for a living. With software. Since the mid
90's.

Why a grain of salt?

TIME IS YOUR ONLY PRODUCT AND ASSET. In a consulting business, that's how it
is. Why ignore your asset and only product. That's it. Time is finite and it
seems to be the major missed point in this article.

A CONSULTING BUSINESS IS NOT A SOFTWARE PRODUCT BUSINESS. The cost to scale a
software business is negligible, compared to consulting where you grow
relative to the number and quality of people you can find.

I'll say it again, the amount of time you have to sell is relative to the
people you have, and how efficient/good they are, and how efficient your
management overhead is to leave people free to bill hours.

EVERY BUSINESS IS NOW A SOFTWARE BUSINESS. It doesn't matter what industry
they're in. Either they get it, and get with it, or they're gone in 10 years
when someone's eating their lunch with little to no effort thanks to a great
systemized + automated software system. In many ways, software is the next
industrial revolution.

CONSULTING'S HOURLY BREAKDOWN IS DIFFERENT THAN PRODUCTS.

Every consulting dollar is generally cut into 3 parts: \- get the work \- do
the work \- manage the work

At a $100/hr rate, you see it's not so pretty when it's more than one or two
people.

What does this formula have to do with how you price a software product? I do
both and know the difference. :)

CONSULTING PROFITABILITY IS IN SYSTEMIZING AND AUTOMATING, LIKE ANY BUSINESS.
Manage each area the best it can be (via enough, but not too much
systemization and automate the sh*t out of everything) and you can get a
60-70% profit rate.

I FIND IT HARD TO CONFUSE CONSULTING AND PRODUCT BUSINESSES. With this
article, for a consulting business that switched to a product business and
then look back and talk about consulting, it all seems a little confusing to
me.

WHY? While smaller businesses might be able to get away with a mindset of
"it's not important" for a little while, growth unfortunately makes this a
"cost of doing business" to manage the "bottom line".

WHAT? Just like we systemize and automate our software products to do
everything, administrative minutiae too, can and should be systemized and
automated.

HOW? Connect a business' preferred project management tool to billing and
accounting systems automatically. This is what I do. I manage several projects
with a few hours of time a month that I get paid for dozens of hours of work
via my developers. My system is honed and works.

ME: I don't die to track every second, but you better believe I have to track
my billing unit, the hour, or fixed price.

There is truth to the idea, though that having to track every second or
micromanage means you have the wrong person. You do, however, need some checks
and balances to keep things moving on their own for everyone's piece of the
pie, and a big part of that is "are we on schedule".

TRICKS: I'm constantly working on my systemization and automation. It will
never end, or be perfect because there's always new tools and technologies and
processes becoming possible.

Forwarding your receipts to one address, PDF printing all purchases, and
writing a quick web app that downloads credit card statements and asks you to
link them up to whatever (whether it's the book keeper or not) isn't stoneage
thinking. It can be simplified, and should be.

THE ONLY TRUTH I KNOW IN BUSINESS: We still have these business problems.
They're not a technology problem, but technology can help.

THOSE MAGICAL PEOPLE WHO SIGN THE CHEQUES. Consulting issues of tracking time
are another. Not all customers are comfortable with flat rate. It's easy to
puff our chest once we have a practice up and running, but the reality is
pricing in consulting is one of the toughest things to get a handle on
relative to the place(s) you work, and for the type of work you do.

Finding a middle ground with new clients (seeing if the client is more
comfortable with per hour vs fixed fee) is far more important. I always
suggest doing a small fixed fee project to build trust in the beginning and
make sure both sides are happy. After that being comfortable enough to say "I
think I can save you money hourly" is fine. Or not.

