FYI…

I’ve NOT stopped writing this.

I’ve just run up against the issue that WordPress free sites do not have the ability for people to sign up and the first level of the paying plan is £20.83 per month.

That’s more than I pay for virtually all the rest of my social media tools – in total, pretty much. One is $5.99, another is $9.99 and so on.

Sooooo, I’ve taken the step of moving Re: Accountancy inside one of my websites where I use the same tools, the same WordPress functions but I can do lots more.

And the extra cost over and above the website cost is

£Nil…

So come along to the Outsourced Finance Director home page and it’s the second from the right in the menu. Heading currently a little bit fluid so I’ll update this post once the new title’s pinned down.

A wet Tuesday in February

and wasn’t it just…

Having survived last week – in what I can only describe as an unexpected calm – I paid for it this week.

I have to first explain the concept of borrowing forward. Sometimes, when the workload is realistically too much, you can get through it all by using next week or the week after’s energy. I can anyway.

But it DOES come at a price.

When you get to the point that you have to repay.

Now I’d assumed last week that my day off on Friday allowed me to unwind so the weekend was – relatively, given an 04.25 get up on the Saturday and getting to bed at 01.15 on the Sunday morning – less than stressful, that I’d sneaked away with the tiredness and it had been mopped up over the weekend.

Not.

Waking on Monday was like climbing out of a deep, dark pit without a ladder. Completely shattered and without a shred of energy. Which was going to be fun with a coaching/mentoring session in the morning and chairing a trustee meeting in the afternoon and a potentially alarmingly short time between the two, especially as I don’t do hungry. As previously mentioned.

Well, the morning meeting was postponed due to external circumstances and all of a sudden my day gets easier, except that my head packs up and I’m hurtling back into the deep dark place of the morning.

So in energy borrowing terms it’s pay back. And the afternoon meeting and a couple of associated chats to do with said meeting are definitely the more complicated of the two.

S’life…

In all honesty the meeting went off very smoothly – imposter syndrome again Colin, you do actually chair meetings reasonably well! – and the gorilla in the room is addressed head on and the outline of a plan of campaign arrived at. But with prep and travel this has taken up five hours of my life so the energy cost adds to the deficit. And…

Wet Tuesday in February. 2nd Tuesday in February is always wall-to-wall mentoring and coaching (me on the receiving rather than the giving end) and I wake up AGAIN in the deep dark pit. Possibly even deeper and even darker. And the weather is ATROCIOUS. Bucketing down with rain, 30 mile drive each way to the first session along a motorway full to bursting with HGVs so got there late but I suppose it was best to get there at all.

So, the week continues with, when I’m in meetings or doing something I’m good and when I’m not, boy am I not!

Not helped at all by some sort of sinus issue. Having had man flu before Xmas and return of the man flu earlier this year I now have massively blocked sinuses. And phlegm in the back of the throat. P-h-l-e-g-m. Who ever came up with that word? And why!

The glasses bear down on the nose and aggravate the sinuses and I presently seem unable to breathe through my nose most of the time. The net result being waking up or finishing my walk with a seriously dry throat. Difficulty swallowing dry.

I’m guessing it’s all part of the overdoing things thing.

Learn to breathe through my ears.

So it’ll go, eventually but it’ll prolong itself by the disruption of my personal life. And no one has yet shown me how to divorce that from my business life.

And the bl00dy computer’s acting up too!

Last Windows update. Overnight Tuesday/Wednesday. Reboots and stops. Probably a driver issue – they normally are – but it does mean having to remember how to start in Safe Mode, F8 key in rapid fashion before Windows kicks in and hangs (again) and it rolls back the updates, tries again, rolls back once more then restarts without the updates. All told, once you’ve restarted all the programmes, about an hour’s work.

That you can’t be elsewhere for much of the time because you’re watching what’s going on in case you need to intervene.

And then…

because it’s not posted the update, it does the same thing again today!

And, I presume, will do tomorrow unless one of my geeky friends can lend a hand?

Got to go now. Day’s almost vanished and I need to try and remember what I’ve done with it. Try the back of the sofa? I lose lots of things down there…

Wife gets man flu too…

See, despite my best efforts, it’s taken almost six weeks for Lorraine to get this cold.

And she’s had a day off.

Every time I think I’ve seen the back of it, it returns. Found myself on my lunchtime walk today with aching ribs – halfway down at the back? That’s a new one on me. Don’t remember aching there before…

It seems absolutely unbelievable that it’s less than two weeks to Christmas and less than three weeks to 2018. Where has it gone? I’m over halfway on my German beer advent calendar (actually we, I do share the daily offering with Lorraine) and wondering what to do for days 25 onwards. I’m open to suggestions… Lorraine has pointed out that there do not appear to be any unsold beer calendars being remaindered. Shame, could have kept it going for a few months yet.

That might have helped getting through the dark and dull days of late-January and February. Days of cold and tedium, waiting for the days to get longer and the weather to cheer up. I am definitely NOT a winter person- if I had my way I’d spend October to March in the southern hemisphere – and the winter months grind long and hard on my joints…

Work is a series of compromises at the moment. It depends substantially on me getting my calendar and to do list properly synchronised. There’s “stuff” that needs doing for end-January but there’s other “stuff” that needs to be completed and filed this month, which only gives me 17 days, even if I do work through Christmas and weekends which I can guarantee I won’t be!

Louisa is tasked with trying to defer most potential appointees to February now, otherwise it’ll definitely be weekends and holidays at the grindstone.

Sigh.

And daughter doesn’t help – currently in the western part of Georgia (the country, not the US state) courtesy of the Batumi Tourist Board if my memory serves correctly, as if the summer holiday in Tbilisi wasn’t good enough, before travelling to Indonesia again! Makes me soooooo grumpy. Sure beats income tax returns I suppose. Grrrr.

It’s been an odd week for appointments so far. Tuesday afternoon cried off – cold/flu. Set out for Tuesday morning do to find M27 motorway stationary westbound. No prizes for guessing which way I was intending to go. Phoned the other person, did ten minutes chat in a lay-by up the road and decided to leave for this month.

Yesterday evening my aunt was supposed to be stopping off betwixt cruise (more people on holiday!) and returning to her home in the Scottish Borders for dinner and a catch up but she’s not well so that didn’t happen. Today a radio interview with a colleague regarding Young Enterprise pulled because the presenter’s in hospital after collapsing with the flu. The desperate actions people take to get out of talking to me… seriously Miles, hope you’re soon okay.

Still that’s all time I’ve been supposedly able to use to reduce the December battle, or would have done if the mind poo wasn’t clogging up the brain. Already had one nap so it would be greedy to have another before this evening. Hmmm?

But the work keeps rolling in. Another agreed in principle and another waiting to discuss by phone before moving forward. Which leads to all sorts of questions about additional tasks I could outsource. It’s still the emails that cause the most issues – another fifty between looking first thing this morning and lunchtime – because it’s the worry of missing an important one amidst all the dross.

Oh, and maybe I’ll be able to add to my portfolio of pro bono work with some interesting options at a local university. No money but the chance to increase name awareness? Watch this space.

Okay – enough blithering for another week – and hopefully enough time to progress another set of accounts on before speaking to another client regarding their accounts and personal tax. HMRC forces you one way but the mortgage application does the opposite. Which one will win? Watch this space…

It may just be “Man Flu” but that doesn’t stop it hurting…

Firstly a massive thank you to the attendees of The Boardroom Network Solent meeting last Friday for the reception given to my reading from last week’s post in my “Two minute warming”. Much appreciated and an encouragement to make sure the humour gets no better going forward…

Funny old week really unless you’re me sitting here with lungs that feel like someone’s attacked them with a cheese grater. 45 minutes awake Sunday night/Monday morning coughing non-stop and 20 minutes attempting to turn my lungs inside out this morning from 01.00. Not the most fun I’ve ever experienced. I’ve (luckily?) never suffered from asthma but sitting there trying to snatch a breath was an experience I’d prefer never to have again.

Major accident with (the contents of) my wine glass on Sunday. Can’t imagine my Extremadura was designed to be drunk out of my WiFi keyboard but having thrown the rest of it over my diary and the floor it was the only amount recoverable short of sneaking back to the bottle…

I don’t know about you but incidents like that or clipping my breakfast bowl on the kitchen sink tap and smashing it when it fell a few weeks ago seriously starts me thinking that old age is leading to increasing clumsiness which means the dementia is already on its way. Not the slightest chance in all probability but it doesn’t help having a hyperactive imagination and an excessively critical view of my own abilities.

The prodigal daughter returned over the weekend. All of a sudden a jet-lagged student lands at Southampton Airport from Hawaii (don’t ask, it’s not like it’s term time or anything – oh, it is, is it???) and proceeds to make the lounge/sofa/her bedroom untidy and turn any routines her parents may have on their heads. She will deny it but she does treat her mother like she’s staff… Bless!

I only started this tonight due to a pitching meeting and it’s now getting very close to bedtime, so I’ll sign off for now and continue Friday morning after the 4Networking Fareham meeting. Nighty night for now…

Right. 12 hours later, a reasonably good night’s sleep for the first time this week, networking breakfast and 50 emails exhorting me to part with money I haven’t got on Black Friday deals I really couldn’t care about and I’m ready to carry on (and on, I know).

The good night’s sleep has really only served to emphasise how tired I am and so I sit here trying to dislocate my jaw while typing. Hyperactive tear ducts giving rise to interesting issues seeing the screen and the yawning threatening to cramp my face up – doesn’t sound like the prettiest sight in the world and, believe me, I’m seriously glad I don’t have a mirror in the office!

The earlier part of the week has been low on appointments allowing me to actually do some of the grunt work that all accountants have to do. I’ve been giving some serious thought as to whether I can seek an outsourcing solution – I’m sure there must be some “real” accountants/bookkeepers out there who would be more than happy dealing with the stuff I’m getting increasingly tired at having to do. Practice what you preach? Watch this space…

There is a scaleability (or scalability – both are in Chambers if not in this useless spellchecker) issue here. There’s not enough here to keep one mouth fed and the same person for both the accounting/bookkeeping side and the taxation side is probably an ask too far so we’re looking at part time and not all that regular which points me towards zero hours or freelance. Plenty to think about here and I can’t easily outsource the software issue “stuff” that’s been causing much of the extra stress – finding someone sufficiently senior to understand the issues who only wants irregular work where it’s me causing the irregular might be a BiiiiiiiiiiG ask…

That said, yesterday was wall to wall appointments (including the hygienist who has a serious issue keeping appointments to time (love to have a major discussion there with her and the owner of the dental practice to sort out why) and a lovely chat with another coach to see where there might be mutual opportunities to a fascinating conversation with a prospective client.

I don’t, on the whole, do too much with absolute start-ups but this one sounds really interesting. Hi-tech, imagery, potential synergies with other clients, the list is endless. More to say if it takes off (big pun there if you only knew).

Software – can’t live with it, can’t live without it

Sigh.

Seem to remember I started last week’s rant the same way… I also notice I whinged about the software last week as well.

S’not gonna stop me whinging this week as well though.

This is the black hole of assignments from a time perspective. I ought to be kicking my heels around a bit at this time of the year. It’s normally not frighteningly busy after making sure there are no December 2016 year ends butting up against filing deadlines.

Instead of which all my get-things-up-to-date time has vanished and the headless chicken impersonations are working overtime!

The fun day was yesterday – although as you may well imagine I use the term fun in a more ironic way than literal.

The world traveller student daughter has been cluttering the house up since arriving back from Indonesia on Monday complete with jet lag and an unfinished dissertation to write before returning to university. Ostensibly due to return Tuesday but the idea of commuting 70 miles by train for one day to attend a 09.15 lecture came to naught because we couldn’t get her out of her bed! No changes there then…

However, come Wednesday, the need to phone Student Finance England and sort out why her loan hasn’t come through this year (same issue every year to date) is overwhelming so on the phone she goes. As is usual in these situations there is a need to do it in my presence as a witness and to share with her the agonies and frustrations of said call. Normally I will stick up for the poor person she is phoning but in this case her annoyance was both just and justified – they couldn’t tell her about progress “because the computers are undergoing maintenance”. You couldn’t make it up! First week back in term/semester 1 of the new university year and you schedule computer maintenance? What pillock thought that one up?

I then follow this by a talk with the support desk of the software supplier regarding getting the charity’s accounts to do what I want them to do. It’s, on the face of it, nothing significantly out of the ordinary – version bl00dy 5 did it, why can’t you do it on version 6?

And do you know what? Because the functionality hasn’t been written into version 6. But my protestations WILL be escalated to the development team. Not a lot of use to me with having to use various workarounds to do something that was previously straightforward and now involves me exporting a trial balance to Excel, writing various formulae (that word is not in the dictionary! What idiot compiled this dictionary? It is now.) Couldn’t get the damned formula to work at first which would have led to a ten minute job being more like two hours but many thanks to my networking friend Shirley Moreman for her welcome assistance in getting the spreadsheet to work. Much appreciated.

I can’t even take my business elsewhere as the software is reasonably priced and most of the rest of it works perfectly well.

Sigh…

When’s our next holiday???

Fill in blanks here *

That’s what my head feels like – if it wasn’t for the cotton wool, nothing would keep my ears apart…

The interesting thing about being The Outsourced Finance Director is the number of things running around in my head at the same time.

The downside is the number of things running around in my head at the same time.

Oh.

Wait a minute! Hmm…

What was I talking about?

Sometimes the mental constipation kicks in, You KNOW everything you need’s in there but you’re bu99ered if you can shift it…

All round typical week really:

• Talk to PA
• Meeting with PR person
• Talk to her about my “serious” blog (YES – I can do one) and how we’re going to promote it outside my immediate email list
• Unpaid chauffeur service to the daughter on her flyaway visit – pun on her business name here – travel blogger extraordinaire and Instagram guru and not even finished Uni yet. 105k followers when I looked this morning and an awakening thirst to turn the hobby into a business
• Two networking breakfasts, both good in their own ways. It is August at the moment and some networks do find it difficult to motivate attendees and guests in the school holiday months
• Discussion with a young business regarding the VAT implications of what they are doing – together with a quick run through the pitfalls. If their plan moves to fruition they’ll be needing the full service in a year or so and now is the time to position myself as the expert and a fount of some free information – give freely and you will get it back in spades!
• Outsourced FD assignment – helping someone transition from being self-employed to being a business owner (and refereeing the board meeting between father and daughter who are both a touch strong willed). Fascinating medium term issue here because of space considerations. At some point they will have to move to expand any further (or multi-site? Must give that idea a shake down sometime)
• One to one meeting with a potential client/colleague – lots of possible synergies and she will be a superb addition to the “team” in certain circumstances in future discussions with other prospects. Having a strategic marketer and brand consultant available “on tap” could be very useful… Because of an almost overlap with the daughter’s business a great conversation that might help her in the longer run (assuming she can accept that Dad and one of his friends might know more than her about something – she’s a millennial so that might be easier said than done!)
• Putting the outline of an annual report for a charity together so that the trustees can do the first draft – happy to critique but it is THEIR report so I’m not letting them outsource that!
• Trying to sort an issue with a senior employee of an organisation who has unfortunately been on the wrong end of some unwarranted criticism by a third party. There are other issues in the background which are exacerbating the situation which makes the situation more fragile. This does need careful handling – one ill-considered move and we could have a recruitment of a replacement issue instead which is not what we’re wanting…

And a few mundane work-y bits and pieces and all too many bl00dy emails as is my want.

Medium term the mundane, etc. should also be outsourced leaving just the fun bits. I cannot wait.

Fascinating calendar entry for tomorrow – eyebrow and bikini. It’s on the family calendar but the girls deny it and I CERTAINLY don’t remember booking it myself…

Maybe that’s enough for now – I feel a well earned nap coming on.

A blog about blogging

Got asked to do a guest blog recently.

It’s one of those things that makes you feel like you’ve arrived – fame is beckoning!

Or would be if I could complete it…

As my regular reader would be aware most of my blogs lack a certain seriousness about them – it got omitted in the contract I think – so actually writing something without falling back on an appalling sense of humour is actually more complicated than I thought it would be!

And it’s a topic that would absolutely lend itself to lightheartedness on the principle that it’s complex and scary and could worry the hell out of the average reader, let alone me.

So eight days later and 178 words done and still unfinished.

What makes it so difficult to do compared with (say) this one?

A number of reasons cross my mind:

• This is in the calendar therefore it gets done (holidays excepted) BECAUSE it’s in the calendar. Chicken and egg revisited,
• Even if I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m going to write about the terror of staring at a blank screen leads to the words starting to tumble out, and
• Because it’s stream of consciousness there doesn’t have to be a topic I have to keep to – if I want to spout drivel about x, y or z there’s nothing to stop me.

Whereas with the guest blog:

• I’m (in my own head at least) tied to the topic I said I’d deliver on,
• I’m supposed to be an “expert” so I feel I have to be able to back up assertions with third party evidence or articles, and
• I could put it in the diary but I know any excuse to do other things – especially of a fee-earning nature – will give me the option of procrastinating (not that I need an option) I must admit.

Which got me thinking (I know, a dangerous thing but please humour me) – is there an opposite to procrastination?

Like anticrastination?

And how can I teach myself to use it?

A small diversion to Google – procrastination itself I don’t hesitate to admit throws up the following article.

Apparently it ought to be antecrastination (Latin “ante” rather than Greek “anti” preceding Latin “cras” for tomorrow) but the following comments DID make me smile:

• I thought of precrastination at first but that appears to be the act of planning to procrastinate, and
• I’ll get back to you on this…

Bless.

Well, sure beats working for a living anyway.

This whole article feels like precrastination in fact!

I continue to improve following the operation but the tiredness still continues. One client is around 100 miles west of here and gets a visit once a quarter. Did this on Tuesday – two hour drive, four hours hunched over a laptop and two hours back.

Needless to say tired all day yesterday but, annoyingly, still tired today!

Superb working lunch today with client and straight back to do this post.

There is an art to the good meeting – if you come away having forgotten to hand over what you specifically took to give them because you’ve been laughing so much, that’s probably the right tone to the meeting.

If you can detail their misdemeanours while still provoking laughter and “sigh, it’s not a typical meeting without being told off by you” with a smile on their face, you’re probably doing something right.

Whether they pay any attention? That’s another question altogether. And the outcome is probably NOT predicated on how stern or otherwise the delivery.

It’s winding down to the end of the month – which ends on a Friday as well – so a double end to the week. The billing all but got completed this morning – just the one late one that happens late every month (yes, you Lorraine) with a visit to my osteopath after I sign off here.

If it wasn’t for the bl..dy emails…

 

Another one of those days

I’ve just received an email reminder re a webinar starting at 15.00. This is interesting as I’ve got it in my calendar as 16.00 and my blog post at 15.00. But I’ve double-booked in any case because at 16.00 I’ll be visiting my osteopath. I’m pretty hopeful I will be able to access it in recorded form some time later.

Mind you I’m also expecting a phone call at 15.00 and I have to hope it’s not too much later because of travel time to my osteopathy appointment. All done – all sorted except my inability to remember my own calendar led to an email to follow the call to correct the timing of a future action. Doh…

So, so far, of my hour set aside for my blog (which generally is not quite enough) I started five minutes late, had a ten minute phone call and I’ve got to go out at 15.30 – which is about now.

So I get back just in time to refresh the webinar screen and get the ‘how was it’ questionnaire. Good timing or not…

I have had a client meeting regarding quite a sophisticated set of accounts with some challenging issues (of an accounting nature rather than real world) and spent rather too long ping-ponging emails regarding Companies House information for a client between said client and Lorraine. In terms of “client” time pretty good going so why does it feel like I’ve not done any “real” work???

It’s just another of those ‘is it me?’ sensations that I get on an all too regular basis. If my back and neck aren’t sore from typing, have I done anything that feels like work today?

Especially as I’ve a set of accounts to construct for one of my charity cases (actually was an Industrial & Provident Society until the recent law change but they work more or less the same in most ways in smaller cases) that is proper roll-the-sleeves-up try and remember which is the debit and which the credit accounting!

Deadlines for pro bono work is always an interesting “issue”. Just because you’re not getting paid to do it doesn’t mean you can do it when you like. Were that the world was that straightforward…

It’s been a networking-and-a-half week – three breakfasts (one tomorrow), one lunch and an evening do. Add a 200 mile round trip on Monday with some pretty intense work activity at the destination and the week seems to have flown by. Mind you, got fed there so a quick photo and I give said client a quick plug on Instagram – almost fifty likes on my private account, not a shade on the business one which attracts around ten times that level of engagement but I’m happy, even if half the likes are from my IG community in St Petersburg and Sochi.

Bizarre but true.

Do they have an inordinate amount of free time on their hands? Is there some strange shadowy reason for all the follows? Is the KGB orchestrating these follows? Has Vlad himself ordered them to keep an eye on me? And, if so, why the private one and not the business one (which seems to be populated by rather a lot of Americans)?

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re NOT out to get you.

I used to be on their mailing list!

Mossack Fonseca. A couple of weeks ago no one other than a few journalists with a big secret and the odd firm of accountants would have come across the name. It’s a bit different now.

It seems a whistleblower released about a terabyte of computer data from within the organisation (that’s the total capacity of the hard drive of most desktop/laptop computers nowadays).

I understand the investigative journalists received the information around a year ago and it has taken all this time to turn it into something understandable.

I find the story fascinating for several reasons:

• the story blows a very large hole in the secret offshore world of trusts and the like,
• the gradual change over the last few years amongst the “average” person as to what is acceptable tax planning and what is not, and
• that feeling of glee when politician X or celebrity Y is squirming in the spotlight!

Easily pleased me.

To a large extent the world of the super-rich has brought matters onto itself. Whether it was David Cameron or George Osborne who said “we are all in it together” or whether it was someone else, it has become remarkably plain that we bl**dy well are not!

Forgive me if this is a misquote but I believe I heard recently that the 85 richest people in the world own the same as the poorest 50% of the population!

I’m not a fan of trickle down of wealth. Estimate of the sums of money squirreled away in tax havens runs into hundreds of trillions of US dollars – enough to wipe out the indebtedness of all the poorer nations on earth.

It may be simplistic but – if you give someone who is not well off £100 they are likely to go and spend it (forget questions of imports, balance of payments, etc. for the moment) whereas the more well off person is likely to save it. The act of spending it will help another person find employment (once enough people do it) and so on and so on…

If anybody thinks I am wrong, I welcome the conversation.

Once it gets to the super-rich, there is a limit to the number of yachts/butlers/houses * (* – delete as necessary) one can spend the money on. You just have to wait until there is a wastrel generation who blow the lot before the dosh gets back into circulation.

Another way of thinking about it is the state of the NHS/roads/local services, etc., etc. If more people (and corporates such as Google, Amazon, etc.) pay their taxes in a low tax or no tax environment, then – unless you are willing to cut services even further (and I know a lot of people who think that is the way to go – bless) the only way will be to take more money off of YOU.

Moral accountant? Must be a USP…

I shall await further revelations with interest!

All About Fraud (and what to do about it)

Good business briefing this morning about fraud and businesses.