I started my career as an accountant after I left school at the age of 18 in a small town in Northern Ireland called Newry. I was “articled” to Phelan and Prescott, a small firm of Chartered Accountants and I was indentured as an apprentice accountant or “articled clerk” for the next five years. During these years, I was expected to study for and write the examinations of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland without the aid of schools or professors but by correspondence with the School of Accountancy in Glasgow, Scotland, to whom I would mail my assignments.

The office was almost Victorian. Desks were piled high with papers, and smoking was the norm. My colleague to the right, an older pipe-smoking  man who seemed to have collected files and papers on his desk since he began his career, could not be seen behind the mountain of paper unless he stood to his full height which was well over six feet tall. There were no computers in those days or calculators which was principally why they needed someone like me. It was my job to put totals at the bottom of the endless pages of transactions that the clients brought to the office. And this was no easy task in the years before decimalization because there were three columns to add on each page – pennies (divide by 12 and carry the result to the next column) shillings (divide by 20 and carry to the next column) and pounds. Four columns really, because the halfpenny was still in use at the time. This was mind-numbing work.

Under the agreement with my principal, I was not paid a salary for the first three years of my contract so rather than live off my parents, I found ways of making money on the side. The clients of the firm were mostly farmers or small retail businesses and it soon became clear that these latter needed my help. All of them came to the firm at the end of the year to have their financial statements prepared but apart from this annual visit, no one was there for them in between when they desperately needed to have some idea of how the business was doing. So some of them recruited me to keep their books and, as I did, I realized that keeping books was more than just a chore for them. I was beginning to acquire some rudimentary skills so I could extract information about profit and loss and we would take inventory once a month instead of annually as before. All of a sudden, the numbness left my mind and I understood that the power of numbers was the power of knowledge.

I left my Newry clients behind after a number of years and pursued my career in Belfast and then in London and eventually in Montreal. However, during all those intervening years, I never forgot my small clients in Newry and I remembered how important the work I was doing was to them. How could I take this obvious need and make it into a business? The basic problem was that it was a difficult business model. Keeping books in those days was meticulous, manual work and, while it was interesting pocket money for a penniless student, there did not seem to be a way of turning the huge demand into a profitable business.

Not until the 1990s, that is. The arrival of the affordable personal computer in the early eighties revolutionized the way all business was conducted but it was not until the early nineties  that the first reasonably-priced small business accounting software hit the shelves. Rudimentary and flawed though it was, it created a business model where one had not been possible before. It decimated the time it would take to enter, total and post accounting transactions. The software suddenly brought the business plan alive.

So that’s when Eircan was born. We went to small businesses and announced our arrival. For the first time ever, here is a firm of trained professional accountants who will take over the whole day-to-day financial and accounting burden from your business and give you back the kind of information on your cash and profits that only big businesses could afford in the past.

Not only is Eircan revolutionizing the way that small businesses are run, we are also revolutionizing the profession itself. It starts with the name the professionals call themselves. “Accountants” you would imagine, do, well, “accounting”, right? Wrong! Most professional accountants do anything but. They do tax, they do auditing, they do “assurance”, they do risk but do they keep your books? Not any more it seems. If you want your books kept, if you want your accounting done, you either do it yourself or you pay an enthusiastic amateur to do it for you. So the small business person is left without the kind of support that large businesses take for granted. A client recently put it to me better than I could ever put it myself: He said “I go to my accountant and ask for help keeping my books and getting information about my business. He says, we don’t do that, you’ll have to find a bookkeeper to help you. But when I ask anything complicated of the bookkeeper, he says, you’d better speak to your accountant”. Frustrating!

So our revolution is a “back to basics” revolution. Once again, accountants are actually doing some accounting for their clients. And why do we claim to be accountants for the twenty-first century? Because now we have tools to do the job in ways we could not even dream of 15 years ago. The software we use is more user-friendly and powerful than anything available to a major multinational. Small business software allows the user to perform incredible gymnastics that are only possible with smaller databases. And with our hosting service, you now have real time access to your books from anywhere on the planet with an internet connection!

Welcome to tomorrow!