Guerilla Treasurer

I recently installed a wireless broadband network in my house. As I am over 40 and utterly disinterested in technical gadgets, I double-checked with the salesperson that the equipment would be very easy to install. He insisted that it would be so easy even his grandmother could do it – literally plug and play with very simple instructions.

From the Secret Guerilla Treasurer Academy

Encouraged by the promise, I agreed to the deal. A little later the operator delivered to my doorstep a box full of instructions, cables, and electronic thingies. What was supposed to take a granny a few minutes took me more than four hours – and I only managed to get one of our three computers to connect wirelessly. Even for this feat I had to humble myself to ask for help from my teenage daughter. Too bad I had not thought of asking for the salesman’s granny’s phone number…

The key stumbling blocks were as follows:

• The equipment delivered was not what was described in the instructions (upon further inspection, some poorly copied instructions for the actual equipment was found from the bottom of the box)
• The operators customer service line dropped me from the queue more than 40 times
• The terminology in the manuals was written using alien terminology (how am I supposed to know which one of the six cables is the Ethernet cable)
• The WiFi router (a term which I was forced to learn) was consistently referred to using different terms in different phases of the process

Usability has been a hot topic in the software business for a long time. But it is not enough that just a piece of software is easy to use – it is the entire package that must be usable. This includes deployment, customer service, production use, and even the end-of-life procedures.

In treasury systems, simply making the actual software usable seems to be an unsurmountable task to many vendors. I have actually seen software packages aimed at business units that I could not have been able to use with my 20 years of treasury experience. So, how on earth can business units be expected to use them?

A Guerilla Treasurer understands the benefits of a solution that is truly usable. Especially when it comes to software that is to be used by business units, he selects solutions that are fast to deploy and do not require lengthy and expensive training or deep treasury understanding.

My apologies for the longer than expected pause in writing this blog. The hectic spring turned into an unusually warm and lazy summer faster than anybody expected – and then things got busy again.

Now I again pledge to keep writing on a regular basis. I have found that writing these entries actually makes me more effective as this process helps focus on what is really relevant. And as the blog has a fair amount of regular readers, it seems some others have found these articles helpful. Hopefully you will keep reading this blog and send me your feedback and suggestions for new topics.

Even though our company is fairly small, we have several IT systems to be used for various tasks. We have systems for CRM, web traffic monitoring, financial management, time tracking, etc. Since we have been from the very beginning advocating SaaS based solutions, we have eaten our own dogfood and used only SaaS solutions ourselves (nothing less would really be credible, would it?).

One of my projects lately has been determining which of these systems are critical and which we could live without. I’ve also been trying to make sure we get the most out of the critical systems. This has meant wading through manuals, which I find rather unpleasant – as you might have guessed by now, I am far too impatient to really read manuals.

From the Secret Guerilla Treasurer Academy

However, it is not the manuals that are the problem. It is the systems that are mind-bogglingly complex and difficult to use. Why is this so?

I firmly believe the problem is the difficulty of the art of simplification. All of us surely have noticed how difficult it is to distill a complex issue into a few simple sentences – It is far easier to write a long treatise and include all possible details. In a similar manner, many system has been designed to take into account every imaginable use case and exception, making them inevitably difficult to use.

A Guerilla Treasurer sets tough standards on usability. Especially when it comes to B2T solutions that are used by many people throughout the corporation with varying understanding of treasury processes, a Guerilla Treasurer demands exceptional ease-of-use.

The main reason for this demand is simple: if a system is hard to use, it soon erodes the motivation of business units to participate in treasury communication and the treasury will, as a result, have no reliable and timely information. Another reason for this demand is financial. If there are a hundred users and each one has to use five extra hours to learn a system, five hundred hours are lost from productive work.

We are currently undertaking an ambitious project to develop a cash forecasting solution especially for small and medium sized companies that is so easy to use that manuals or instructions are rendered obsolete. (Don’t worry, this does not mean we won’t include manuals – if nothing else, consultants will want them.)