Everybody knows where you’re most likely to be told “Say ahhhhh”. For a routine medical check-up you go to the doctor. They’ll use tools to measure your temperature, check blood pressure, listen to your heart and check your lungs. The big ice-cream stick comes out and you’ll be told “Say ahhhhh”. Doctors always start by properly checking out our body’s vital signs. Everything else depends on them working properly.


They actively go through a standard series of measurements and observations. Only then can they give feedback and advise on any actions that need to be taken.

Businesses are in need of routine check-ups just as people are. It’s part of business management. And whatever the scale of your business, getting the right stuff, the stuff your business needs to have working properly, comes down to one thing, understanding the current condition.

This means business information systems to help you measure, and thus manage, the business. So what to measure.

Abtrac Integrating With Xero: A Xero Users Success Story with Abtrac

As part of our research for this article, we called several of our Xero users in New Zealand and Australia. Many gave us both a verbal response and followed up with a more thoughtful email.

One was from Janine at a professional services firm of some 30 staff in Wellington, New Zealand. It really covered all the things every one of our respondents had raised. We print it here with her permission.

 Abtrac CEO Edward O’Leary gives his thoughts on How to Manage Business Advisors

Someone called into my office to see me the other day. She was quite frustrated. She knew I’d worked for an accounting firm in my past. She’s been a user of Abtrac for a long time. And she was in the neighbourhood. She’d had problems with some of the balances in her accounting system. She went to see her local accountant for help to sort things out.

You’ll be hard put to find a news site today that doesn’t have a bad forecast for the global economy.

Even locally we read that the majority of people in our lovely lands are inexorably falling behind economically. “The decline of the middle classes.” Indeed we probably all know people who are struggling right now, trying to keep up, trying to live within tight financial constraints.

Project Planning and Management

Every growing business gets to a stage where directors and managers get the feeling they’re ever so slightly ‘out of touch’. Things are too busy. It can get worse quite suddenly. Founders aren’t seeing the progress they’d hoped the business would have made across the range of jobs at hand. At the end of each week,  and at month end there is outstanding work that should have been completed.

Obtaining buy-in on expectations of work to be done by your staff is part of the recipe for success.

It’s not Big Brother. It’s plain and simple, good business management. Shying away from discussions on expectations will result in Parkinsons Law prevailing. That benefits nobody.

In any business, the ability to efficiently collect and analyse data is widely acknowledged as key to its success. But incredibly, the widespread use of spreadsheets for data manipulation and storage is alive and kicking. Reports are delivered with much effort and often collated from data that let’s face it, is old.

I took an enquiry recently from someone. How could they better manage their costs in a firm of 40 staff. She started by saying their team of 10 full time administration and accounts people, “do everything for us”.

Since many of our clients run at ratios of 10:1 or 8:1 billable to non-billable staff I was staggered to hear of a ratio of 3:1. Upon further discussion it became clear.