by admin | Feb 1, 2016 | Accounting, Advisory, Amaranthine, Enterprise, Finance, Professional
Careful readers of our blog will have noticed, among the various important updates on topics such as security, budgets, and happy Christmases, an emerging theme has begun to … errm … emerge. In an earlier post (HERE), we picked up the gauntlet thrown down by our professional counterparts at KPMG and explained why Aiteo Consulting must be the accounting firm you are looking for. It’s definitely worth a read, and not simply because the Guardian Small Business Network described it as a ‘masterclass in blog writing’. @AiteoConsulting A masterclass in blog writing, well done! — GuardianSmallBiz (@GdnSmallBiz) October 23, 2015 In a follow-up post (HERE), which we can now designate as the second of a slowly developing trilogy, we introduced to you the idea of getting value for money out of your accountant – a task many find slightly more difficult than getting blood out of a stone. Your accountant should play the role of your finance director and should be central to your business. But what does that mean in practice? And if you hire us, how would we do it? So we come to the final step, and here’s hoping that, unlike the slightly more famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, we don’t actually end up with five instalments. So let’s talk about value. Value means different things to different people (diffr’n’t strokes for diffr’n’t folks and all that). And in order to deliver you a service that you value, we need first to work out together what you’re looking for and tailor our service accordingly. In order to do this effectively and efficiently, there is...
by admin | Nov 5, 2015 | Accounting, Advisory, Amaranthine, Enterprise, Finance
In a recent post (HERE) we looked at a Guardian Small Business article on choosing your accountant, and explained why Aiteo Consulting simply must have been in the author’s mind as she wrote. Now, if there is any truth to the chorus of complaint which often follows the words ‘I tried to speak to my accountant and…’, we might have to admit that in most minds, value and accounting services go together like blood and stones. So a recent article, published in the same august organ (HERE – if you must – but do wait until the end if you can), begins to grapple with the thorny question of getting value for money from your accounting services. Now, before launching into our analysis, we would like to say this. When a major accounting firm launches a new nationwide service targeted to small business, and the Head of the aforesaid service manages to write a clear problem statement for a national daily without it in any way coming across as an advertorial, we can only applaud. If you do look carefully, you’ll see that the author is indeed Head of Small Business Accounting for … well you can read the article to find out. After all they haven’t paid us to advertise on here! Credit where it’s due though, and we believe the article represents an excellent contribution to the debate about value. So let’s take a look at some of these themes. Entrepreneurs often pitch their businesses without knowing basic financial information. To be fair, an evening in watching Dragons’ Den wouldn’t be half as much fun without the...
