The inconvenient truth about small business accounting is:

Small business accounting is boring

Recently I was participating in an online forum with Hubspot — an internet marketing company, about  using white papers to attract clients / users.  I had initially thought that it would be difficult to create accounting related white papers that people would want to read because I thought accounting is boring.  I may be shooting myself in the foot here, after all, I am providing an online accounting software for small businesses.  How dare I consider accounting to be boring?

Then Pete Caputa asked me one of the most important questions I have encountered since I began working with Clarity Accounting:

What are the compelling reasons why someone would buy your product?

Honestly, after he asked this question, I thought about it for two whole days.  Why am I asking people to keep track of their business finances on Clarity Accounting?  Then I reached some level of clarity.  Here is how I responded:

When I first started out in commission only sales 4 years ago, I had no idea what I was doing. Certainly not in the area of finances. At the end of the year when I was scrambling to do my taxes, I realized that after deducting my expenses, I only made $6000.  I avoided looking at my money situation and didn’t find good tools that could help me. I even bought Quickbooks at the time and didn’t ended up doing anything with it.  I really hope that I could create a tool that is easy enough to assist people in overcoming their fears of looking at their finances — especially if they are running a small business. I run little workshops out of my “office” helping anyone who wanted a breakthrough from piling their receipts in a shoe box to having an organized system of dealing with their business finances. So far, the process has been very rewarding for me. I am creating a series of help files and some education materials for small business owners out of the training sessions. I think our online accounting software seem to be a by-product of my desire to transform the way small business owners view their finances and it may not even be specific to accounting since a lot of blocks occur on a very subconscious level. Bottom line: if my accounting software can make a difference in people’s financial well being, I am grateful

Soon after I have posted this comment on the forum, I ran across a Clarity Accounting customer at a networking event.  She said to me, “I just LOVE your accounting software! I entered all my records for 2008 and realized I was spending too much money.  I had no idea how much money I was spending before.  I have now put myself on a budget and re-evaluated my marketing strategy so that I can be more effective with my money.” 

Now that is someone who has had a breakthrough in her finances and making excellent business decisions based on real financial data.

What I notice about most business owners going through my training program is that they take their shoe box to my place and they spend the first 15-60 minutes freaking out before they do anything.  They feel guilty, they feel anxious, and they feel embarassed.  But I think doing something about their shoe box of receipts takes a great deal of courage — the kind of courage I didn’t used to have myself.  I used to be the kind of person who didn’t even want to open my mail.  I was a true avoider of money.  Now, I enter my own expense receipts into Clarity Accounting.  While my business partner is the person in charge of our business finances, I think I would like to take over that role starting in the next fiscal year (He will be greatly amused when he reads this blog post I am sure).

What was most amazing about these people who are coming to me is that once they have their user account set up and they start to enter a few invoices and expense receipts, they don’t want to stop! In the first session, they spent most of their time freaking out and they can only stay for an hour before they have had enough of accounting.  By the time they came back for subsequent sessions, they end up staying longer and longer.  One person even wanted to book 2 hours or more to just sit there to finish her bookkeeping while I am writing my blog posts.  I swear, once people get started, they can’t stop!

My intention is that Clarity Accounting can be something that gets people started.  Hopefully Clarity Accounting can empower people to take a closer look at how their business is really doing — helping small business owners to make great decisions for their businesses.

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Tags: accounting is boring, income and expense tracking, invoicing software, online accounting software, quickbooks, quickbooks alternative, small business accounting, small business accounting software, track expenses, track income

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 2:43 pm by May Chu and is filed under Business Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.