Tax day.

[Dave A]

OMG. Tax day today.

Deadlines loom large.

[duncan drennan]

Luckily have company and trust IRP6's in.....now just to get my wife's sorted out

[Dave A]

I'm glad to see some people have had the time to reply...

rushing, rushing.

[duncan drennan]

I'm glad to see some people have had the time to reply...

rushing, rushing.

Tsk, tsk, you naughty boy

I see the eFiling site was taking some strain today....

[Dave A]

Naughty? I was feeling more like insane earlier! But whew. Mission accomplished.

For the record, it was a system conversion which has been two months in the preparation. The very heart of a change from small biz to medium sized enterprise systems. Today was D-Day. My heart was in my mouth when at a stage the one app seemed to stall for (I'm told by a partner who was watching me at the time) about 20 minutes..... The thought of recovering from a crash at that point - not funny.

I sure tortured some computers and some staff today.

[duncan drennan]

Interested...what change did you make?

[Dave A]

I hesitated posting this because at least one member of staff is going to see this and think "You sneaky bastard!"

My small business systems were starting to crack. Mainly volume related. For small business sytems, they were pretty good, but it becomes increasingly difficult to identify when deviations occur, let alone exactly why they occured and who was involved. Things get easier to hide or lose. An individual failure can crash a whole process and go undetected

The goal is to build systems that essentially self-audit and reveal deviations with the minimum of duplication. Avoiding duplication is the hard part, and the system needs to be so integrated that it would take three parties to collude to bury particularly critical deviations. This is achieved by division of the activities and all inputs going into an integrated system. If one person deviates, someone else suddenly finds they've got a problem completing their task.

Essentially, there has been a process of restructuring of activities and responsibilities that has been going on for two months. An exact point was needed to be defined as the clean starting point of the new systems.

Now, all I need to do is peruse a small set of reports and all is revealed. I'll know where there is lag, pressure and shrinkage. The system uses two interlinked tracking mechanisms. Any particular task's flow through the system from first order to payment is intertwined with the flow of resources and stock. Both have known entry and exit points which are closely cross-referenced unknowingly by independent operators. There are still some elements to be implimented but the clean start has been achieved.

Using EOFY as the reason for my very specific demands on my staff to have eliminated all "vagaries" - late invoice or stock item bill capture, loose stock recons etc allowed me to achieve a clean starting point without giving the reason as the implimentation of self-policing systems to trap errors.

Ensuring that everything was just the way I wanted it on D-Day proved quite trying.

[duncan drennan]

Ensuring that everything was just the way I wanted it on D-Day proved quite trying.

Understatement of the year (last financial year that is...)