Last year I moved house with my family. Our new home being a ‘new build’, you’d think it would have pretty much all the ‘mod-cons’ that you need. After all, it’s brand new, so it should be fully kitted out. Well, that’s not quite the case.
I live in what can only be described as a very ‘hard water’ area. After a week the kettle would need descaling, the shower head quickly covered in limescale, and all the taps around the house looking old before their time. So, we decided to invest in a water softener.
Now a water softener is not the cheapest appliance in the house, and to be honest, it’s not much to look at. In fact 99% of the time it is out of sight below the kitchen sink. It’s only really paid any attention every 6-8 weeks when the salt needs to be replaced. Other than that, it works away doing its thing.
Since the installation of the water softener 9 months ago, the kettle has not had to be de-scaled once, the shower head and taps look as good as new, and cleaning the shower and bathroom is less work. Not only that, it’s the limescale building up that you can’t see that can cause the most damage. In the pipework, the dishwaser, the washing machine. Often reducing the life of appliances by half.
Many accounting software programs have fantastic core functionality, but often lack the tools that are required to really comply with true ‘accrual’ accounting. This is when we get to the stuff that can sometimes feel a little ‘dull’ - but it’s important to get right.
We can be left with a lot of tasks that don’t fill us with excitement, yet still we plod on using methods that will generally take us longer than they should, because ‘that is what we’ve always done’. Not only do we stick with what we know, but quite often could be doing more harm than good. Using the same formulas in a spreadsheet that could have been incorrect for the last couple of years.
Investing in any type of software can sometimes incur a cost, and some time might be need to be spent to learn how everything works. Like a water softener, it might not always be for something that appears to be immediately essential, but gradually, these dull tasks can eat into much more time than we realise.
Understanding how technology can help your business, and identifying all tasks that can be automated will increase efficiencies and profitability. If there is anything that you do ‘manually’ on a regular basis, it is likely that there is a piece of software that can do the job more accurately in a fraction of the time.
Investing a little bit of time and money now on improving systems and processes, will pay you back dividends later.
