Writing

Notes on running a business on real numbers

Accounting, stock, payroll and tax compliance, written from what the system actually does. Mostly about the places where two numbers that should agree stop agreeing, and what to do about it.

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Accounting

Closing the month in days instead of weeks

A long close is rarely a staffing problem. It is a list of things that were allowed to go unresolved during the month, collected and resolved at the end of it.

3 min read

People and payroll

Attendance rules people accept as fair

Attendance data becomes money at the end of the month, which makes every ambiguity a dispute. One rule, applied the same way to everyone, beats a strict rule applied inconsistently.

3 min read

People and payroll

Payroll you can explain to the person asking

An employee who cannot understand their payslip does not trust it. The fix is not a better layout - it is recording how each number was calculated, at the time it was calculated.

3 min read

Operations

Running several branches without losing track of any of them

The hardest part of a second branch is not the stock. It is that every record now needs to know where it belongs, and the ones that do not know become invisible.

3 min read

Guides

What Arabic support really means in business software

A translated menu is the easy ten percent. The other ninety is printed documents, error messages, sorting, numbers and the direction of the page.

3 min read

Tax and compliance

Egypt and Saudi e-invoicing: what is the same and what is not

Two mandates, two formats, two sets of vocabulary. The parts of your system that have to differ are fewer than the parts that do not - if the design separates them.

3 min read

Tax and compliance

E-invoicing without stopping the business

The tax authority being unreachable must not stop you invoicing. How to design the submission path so an outage is a queue, not a halt.

3 min read

Accounting

Costing you can defend in a meeting

If you cannot explain how an item cost was calculated, you cannot defend the margin that depends on it. What moving average actually does, and where it goes wrong.

3 min read

Accounting

Why your stock report and your inventory account disagree

Two numbers that must match and usually do not. The causes are few and specific, and each one points at a different missing control.

3 min read