About 4 years ago we bought a communications and advertising firm called DG4 (see www.dg4.com). We had been managing it for a few years beforehand on behalf of the owner who was a client when he fell ill and, when he finally passed on, his widow offered the shares to us and, since there were two terrific employees, great relationships with some talented consultants and a solid base of clients including Lafarge Cement and Tembec, we thought “why close it?”.

But we’re accountants - and jokes about “creative” accounting aside – it was hard to see a fit between Eircan and DG4. Until this year, that is. I decided we needed to give the whole business model a makeover and to get away from dependence on print media because the future seemed to me to lie elsewhere. We asked DG4 to redo our website and, as they did, it struck me that we had found the bridge we were looking for between Eircan and DG4: Eircan’s clients are mostly small and medium sized businesses and nearly all of them have websites that – well -  “suck” is the most appropriate word I’m afraid! What do I mean by “suck”? Well the creative work is terrible, the content static and they simply to not seem to have any “raison d’etre” apart from the perceived need just to be present on the web.

A simple presence on the web, however, is so “last week”. In today’s internet, the most powerful use of a website is to open a portal of communication between you and your clients. You don’t sit there and wait for passing trade. You use the web to do business with them and to begin a dialogue. That’s the essence of what’s called “Web 2.0” or the second generation of internet websites inspired by the success of wiki sites and social networking like myspace or facebook.

E-commerce is now available to all. You can take orders on the web or receive payments or sell memberships and have all these feed directly into your accounting system. This is where even the most hard-headed businesswoman begins to see the return on investment. Instead of hiring a team of three people to take orders by phone, transcribe these into your accounting software and send a confirmation to your client, you give the client the ability to do the work herself 24/7 through a web portal and, since the client enters the orders, you will no longer have to worry about the mistakes that your staff inevitably make - because they are human. Even if you don’t take orders, your client can pay her bill by credit card or subscribe to an event. Your imagination is the limit.

However, a lot of small businesses simply want to use the website to build a relationship with their clients. We’re like that. We have a growing number of clients and all of them are important to us but we need to show them they are. We need to give them a space of their own on our website where they can read articles we think might be of interest to them, where they can pick up copies of their financial statements and tax returns or where they can check the progress of the current project we are working on for them.

Maybe we’ll put webcams in the office so they can see how hard we are working!

We already use our server to host the accounting files of our clients, where they can make enquiries in their own set of books or book some entries while we perform some of the complicated transactions. So, we are taking the whole accounting project into the universe of web 2.0 and in that universe the client has full knowledge of everything that’s going on. We’re well beyond the galaxy of simple automation or paperless processes. We’re now entering an area of space where the client has as much information as we have in real time and can become as involved in the project as they want.

And with knowledge comes peace of mind and peace of mind is our top-selling product!

Our new client portal will be up and running before the Fall.

Thanks DG4!