No pitch, no product. A message to an accountant at a large salon chain asking one thing: what does multi-outlet finance actually look like from the inside? His reply, in his own words:
“I’ve worked with different accounting setups, and one thing I’ve noticed is that the challenges in multi-outlet businesses usually go beyond basic bookkeeping. The software can generally handle invoicing, GST, ledgers and outlet-wise reporting quite well. But when it comes to actual reconciliation, commissions, payment gateway settlements, inter-outlet transfers, bank reconciliation and GST mismatches, there’s often still a fair amount of manual checking involved. The interesting part is that every company handles these processes differently depending on their software, internal controls and volume.”
An accountant at a 140-outlet chain, unprompted
Why it mattered
If every company does it differently, no off-the-shelf product can model it.
That last line of his is the commercial argument in one sentence. The software handles the parts that look the same everywhere. The money leaks in the parts that don’t. Someone with nothing to gain from telling me so had just confirmed the thesis I was calling businesses to test.
What I learned
- Ask about their work, not your product. People are generous with the first and guarded about the second.
- The best discovery answers are the ones you could not have written yourself.
- Write the reply down verbatim. The exact words are the evidence; a paraphrase is an opinion.