Having data isn’t the same thing as being able to use it

Charlie Forster · 3 min read

The ledger isn’t the business

The small business owners I’ve spoken to during my market research aren’t short of data. They’re short of a place where it all comes together and makes sense.

I was reminded of this when I showed an early version of what I’m building to a business owner. He runs a services business with several projects on the go at once — busy, growing, and juggling a lot.

He described his information as “all over the place”. We haven’t yet explored exactly where it all lives. What he did make clear was that he doesn’t have time to bring it together. He is trying to grow his business, and that is where he needs to spend his time.

The question he wanted to answer was simple: what does cash look like over the coming months? From our conversation, the information he had to hand wasn’t giving him the full picture.

The accounting package isn’t wrong

It’s tempting to make this a conversation about accounting software. But the ledger is an important part of the picture: invoices raised, payments received, bills paid. It tells you a great deal about the financial activity recorded so far.

Understanding what happens next also means understanding what is happening in the business.

For a project-based business, that might mean asking: when will a project reach its next milestone? How quickly is it using its budget? If delivery slips, what happens to the timing of payments? Those are examples of the questions that can connect operational information to the financial picture.

Some accounting systems include forecasting and project tools. The question is whether the information needed to answer the owner’s questions is available, connected and current enough to use.

Data that never meets

What struck me in that conversation was the work involved in bringing scattered information together, and where that work sits among an owner’s priorities.

He wants to grow. Gathering information from across the business competes with the work of winning customers and delivering for them. Yet that same information could help him make decisions about growth.

We haven’t gathered his documents or brought his data together yet. That comes during the beta test. What excited him was the prospect that Tayseer could help him do it.

The possibility is to bring the information together, identify what is missing and make it easier to explore the questions that matter to him. Whether we can do that in a way that is useful and saves him time is what we need to test.

My work in SME banking has included looking at businesses through the processes and information institutions use to assess them: documents, fields and ratios. That perspective has shaped the questions I’m now asking from the business owner’s side.

An owner trying to plan growth and an institution assessing that business may need to understand some of the same things: how money moves through the business, what commitments lie ahead, and what could change. Bringing the underlying information together could help the owner explain that story as well as understand it.

That is what I mean by the SME as Data Author: a business owner who can bring their own information together, understand what it says and decide how to use it to tell the story of their business.

Having data and being able to use it are different things. The practical challenge is making the connection without handing the owner another time-consuming administrative job.

There is a catch, of course. Bringing your own data together may help you understand your business. It doesn’t automatically mean anyone else will trust it. A picture you’ve assembled yourself still needs evidence behind it.

That’s the next question in this series: once your data comes together, what does it take for it to be trusted, and who does that work?

For now, the question I want to test is whether we can help an owner make better use of the information their business already creates, while leaving them more time to build it.

I’d be interested to hear from other owners: when you need a fuller picture of your business, what does it take to bring the information together?