Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

As has been mentioned here before, with another hat on I am the owner and operator of a small business.

Being technical in accounting terms our book keeping is done on a “cash basis” which isn’t an *exact* translation of “pay at the till before leaving” but the fact remains that as a business I do not do credit or terms of any kind, and I get payment before I ship / part with the goods in question, so it’s a lot like your local shop or petrol station.

I do not do due after 30 days or pay at the end of the month or cash on delivery or anything else, and in this year of 2017 with ebanking where I get an SMS within 60 seconds of a deposit being made in the bank, that means no SMS, no goods… I don’t care about your BACS taking 3 days to clear, I’ll get the SMS when the money is added to my account.

Until that point, I haven’t been paid, and you do not get your shit.

What I am seeing more, and more, and more of, is businesses that have;

• only one person who can pay invoices, and they aren’t in today
• a policy to only make payments every wednesday or whatever
• an accounts department that processes things in order, and no great rush about it
• an accounts department that can only make payment via BACS printed in purple ink on a camel’s left testicle
• an accounts department that only knows how to deal with “Net30” terms, eg 30 days credit.
• an accounts department that only knows about their own policies, nothing else exists.

Of course the accounts dept have fuck all to do with the guys who first came to me for a quote and who then made an order, many of whom have some sort of deadline, I’ll speak on a wednesday and they want to know if I can arrange collection the same day and if I can make delivery the next monday.

I say yeah, sure, no problem, here is your invoice, the courier will be by within 2 hours to collect.

So two days pass and it is now friday and the job is pretty much done, but I have not had my SMS, so I email them a heads up, job is done guys but no sign of payment (I should make it clear that I have an entire page on a top level link on the website devoted to payments and terms and so on) … oh shit… and we get to one of the bullet points above.

I politely shrug in email and say “no dollah no fuckee” and sometimes it turns into phone conversations with the guys who placed the order, who are ALL on my side and totally get the concept that I have to pay for my diesel before I can drive away, and nobody has negotiated or signed any credit agreements with me, not that I would offer such a thing, and we are back to the bullet points, and them having to chase their internal accounts department.

Allegedly it usually is a variation on “the 25k order with 3k penalties we need to ship by wednesday is being held up because you won’t pay the fucking guy 500 quid who has done the work we need done to finish that order on wednesday” and by the way, he invoiced us last wednesday…

I actually know some of these companies quite well, and the fact is there isn’t a cash flow problem that the accounts department are trying to mitigate, it’s just increasingly “how they do business”

Nor do I want to give the impression that these are all multinationals with offices in Riyadh and Hong Kong working in oil and gas or aerospace, one or two are, but others are just local small businesses like mine, who maybe have a book keeper who comes in (not even physically, maybe virtually) one afternoon a week.

For all of them the reasons to use me are the same, we’re small and local so the supply chain is short, lead time is minimal, and we are cheap.

I give a lot of shits about the quality of the work of course, but that is a bonus they don’t get to be aware of for the first order when they place it.

But whereas I used to butt up against this issue once every three or four weeks, it’s now up to about twice a week, because even repeat orders with the same company who are delighted with everything, the accounts department will not change the way *it* works.

I have one of these guys who has learned, he phones his accounts department the minute he sees the invoice, and says he will stay on the phone with them while they process the payment, and if he has to hang up that call and payment hasn’t gone through, the next call is to the MD to say production is delayed thanks to the accounts department.

Others are less proactive, and only start screaming at accounts when they learn that the job is done waiting to be shipped, and on hold waiting for payment.

The issue here really is that to the accounts department, it isn’t money they handle, it’s just stuff, which puts them on a par with production and engineering, who just move stuff around, which makes them at least as important as production and engineering, which also means they can’t be seen to trivialise anything and make it seem as simple and fast as “hang on a mo, clickety click, ok that’s all done and processed and paid”

And it reminded me of a conversation I had with a banker many years ago about the 3 days it took a BACS transfer to clear, even though the transaction itself took milliseconds, because he stated that if the transaction itself was done in milliseconds, nobody would value it anymore, it has to take time to have any perceived import or value.

I’m sure there are many parallels here, lets say brexit, oh horrendously complex, will take years to negotiate, when the fact is you could probably tie the whole thing up in 72 hours if you wanted to, but then you’d wipe out all the alleged perceived import and value in your negotiating process and yourself as a whole.

House conveyancing, will and probate, court cases, yeah, all takes weeks or months, because where else is the perceived import and value?

The print newspaper and small ads scene went the way of the dodo because of this, and for all his orange rambunctiousness and idiocracy, I think Trump gets this with his tweets.

Banks *are* shifting towards instant everything, and I think we all vastly under estimate how big of a change this is, because it makes so many cultural delays seem like what they are, faux attempts by the incumbents to add fake percieved import and value to what they do.

“tap and go” contactless payments change everything, so does ebanking, my landlord sends me a text saying he has a water bill for 200 quid, I log in to ebanking and 60 seconds later send him a text back saying he has been paid, paid as in he can spend the money now, wherever he is, because it is showing as a balance in his account.

I’m old enough to remember walking into the local american express office as being the fastest way to pay GM/detroit diesel in the US for allison gearbox parts to be shipped by air freight that day to parts foreign, because all other methods took a week before they’d ship.

You paid a premium for that back then, both for the money transfer and the parts themselves, but you saved 7 days downtime, so the only question you asked was how much?

Now fast forwards to 2017 and I know of two local shops where you cannot pay any way other than contactless tap and go or smartphone tap and go, and it sounds all hipster bollocks and everything else, but, as the manager says, he can run stock on a 48 hour basis, and he can order and pay before 4;30 pm and he will have a delivery the next morning, because the supplier got paid the instant he made the order… do not discount that side of the hipster bollocks equation.

All the talk of automation and the AI apocalypse, no man, it ain’t robots with arms and cylon eyes replacing the guy slinging burgers or the shelf filler at the supermarket or the pizza chef…

It’s the “AI” and automation that I used this morning, at 10.02 am an email from a customer telling me the invoice I did largely automagically online with quickbooks has been paid, the email arrived two minutes after the sms telling me the same thing, I can spend that money now if I choose, so the robot and AI is the one replacing the accounts department in my business.

Sure, it’s a very specialised and narrow AI that does accounts, and another similarly limited one that does banking, but, so what, it WORKS.

Sure, it has weaknesses and potential problems, but the shit it is replacing has the same weaknesses and plenty of real problems to go along with the potential ones.

For an “economy” like the Uk based largely on so called “service industries” this is the death knell.

PayPal was never allowed to operate like a real bank, but it made a great experiment for the banks to observe, one step removed.

Now we have what happened yesterday in Saudi, literal multi billionaires wiped out in a microsecond, no long drawn out “value added” delayed process involving lawyers and bank staff and so on, cliclety click, job done man.