Good Things You Have Seen Overseas That You Wish We Had Here In The UK

That's a nice expression, never heard it put that way before, me too.

The IT industry used to afford me the privilege of working about 160 man days a year for exceptionally good money, sometimes more sometimes less, the time off for research or just relaxing was brilliant, I had that luxury for 13 years but now I am a wage slave, 22 days hols plus public, I used to bill by the hour based on actual time spent onsite, I did not charge for travel time but the rate to my customers was adjusted to account for that, I still earn well but it is not the same and I am still somewhere near 40% of what I was making in 1999.

Accounting principles are not hard to master but the whole process is a right royal pain in the backside, if you don't manage it on a day to day basis then the simple basic arithmetic of accounting morphs into a hideous hyper mathematics that is intimately tied to the spacetime continuum, in other words did I really spend that money back then and what did I spend in the periods defined by the taxman, and what do I have to report for the period that is taxable but where I earned the money in the accounting year that does not match the tax year.

I understood it all once upon a time to the point where I could have programmed it, in other words written my own programs, but generally accounting just filled me with utter fear and dread every time I opened QuickBooks and tried to do my VAT, I spent hours and hours making absolutely sure that my returns were exactly correct, I was utterly terrified of getting even a couple of quid wrong.

The thing that makes accounting hard is the temporal dimension (time) that's my theory anyway, and Microsoft have advanced temporal features called 'semi additive measures' in their SQL Server database, but you only get access to those features in the really expensive Enterprise version, we are talking somewhere in the 30 to 50 grand range for a small system, it is one of the most blatant examples of crippling a piece of software that I have ever seen, but it is their privilege.

The semi additive measures feature provides a way to sum things over uneven intervals of time, might sound simple but it is bloody hard to do normally, and they provide it as part of their Enterprise database version, standard edition costs just about a couple of grand and from a business viewpoint has little missing apart from this specific data analysis feature.

My point is that this feature alone proves that accounting is a hyper mathematical nightmare just like the great late Douglas Adams pointed out in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Been there done that mate, I hate my life

Still years later living with the consequences.

Being self employed is a great responsibility, it is very very nice if you are in a good industry that pays well, most self employed people are in difficult industries that don't pay well, but for those that luck out and get good rates they need to be competent in many area's that are not related to their primary profession and that's the hard bit about self employment, you have to broaden your skill base quite a bit.

I was called in to look at a spreadsheet system in 1989, for a particular manufacturer of cranes, the accountant had been mucking about with it and screwed up the links, the head office in Sweden provided the spreadsheets for data entry and capture and they were supposed to get filled in and sent back every month, I am not kidding they had about 20 interconnected spreadsheets, the thing was a dogs breakfast, I had to work out what the links were supposed to be and restore the relevant formulae, the accountant was panicking I think he had been trying to hide something and had hacked around and broken it, but of course no backups.

I managed to fix it for him but it was so obvious that the data in those sheets belonged in a database a structured store rather than the totally unstructured mess that comprised all these bleedin spreadsheets.

A few weeks later the accountant was complaining about our bill, my pal that had brought me in for this one had billed him for his own time and two days of my time total 900 quid I think and he wasn't happy about paying it, in the end he relented and paid, the following month he demonstrated his truly wonderful accounting skills and paid us again which of course gave us an accounting problem as we didn't have an invoice to back up the second payment

That particularly large international crane company never got their 900 quid back, not sure if the accountant remained in a job

I plead the fifth..........