Getting it right the first time

Mistakes are expensive, and precision at the source pays off many times over. The cheapest error is the one that never enters the books.

We invest in training and in our own software for one reason: to deliver financial reports we can stand behind. Before anything leaves the house, the figures have to agree. We reconcile the VAT returns, the salary certificates, the social-security declarations and the annual financial statements against one another — every number has to tell the same story.

When something does not match, the work of tracing it begins. Following a single stray franc back through the books can take hours, sometimes days. It is painstaking and costly — and it is time we would rather spend with our clients, on tax optimisation, liquidity and the financial strategy that moves a business forward.

There is a well-known principle in data quality, the 1-10-100 rule: it costs roughly one unit to prevent an error at the source, ten to correct it once it has slipped through, and a hundred to live with the consequences if it reaches a tax authority or an audited statement. Bookkeeping follows the same arithmetic. A wrong entry rarely stays put — it carries into the VAT return, the payroll and the year-end close. Catching it at the document is worth a hundred corrections later.

This is why we treat precision at the source as a skill in its own right. Our software already automates much of the data handling: bank movements arrive on their own, documents are read and pre-sorted, the obvious matches are made automatically. But automation is the muscle, not the judgement. It still takes an experienced bookkeeper to verify and correct the entries right where they begin — the machine surfaces what looks wrong, and the person decides what is right.