Stop whining and start coding

For 15 years now, I have worked with businesses that need help with QuickBooks, the accounting software. On any day, I may do a couple of remote sessions, some trouble shooting and work on various client projects. All in the hope that I can somehow make a client’s business one teensy bit better.

When I first started doing consulting, I thought that I could teach anyone anything. I tried like hell to teach accounting to folks who constantly reminded me that they are not accountants. I persisted on though. If I just change the way I am teaching the material, I thought, they will understand it. Or maybe, they just need more repetition. Or more handle holding. Or maybe a puppy???

Over time I started to realize that I kept seeing the same mistakes over and over again. And it got me to thinking. Maybe the clients aren’t to blame at all. I mean if almost every user of a product makes the same mistake in it, who should be the guilty one? The software, of course! So problem solved, we will just blame the software.

Okay, so with that kind of figured out, I continued working with clients but when they were confused or made a mistake, instead of it being their fault, I started blaming the engineers who made the darn thing in the first place. This helped in making my trainees feel better about themselves, but certainly didn’t make the problem magically disappear. They still made the same mistakes but at least now they had better self esteem.

So for many years, I continued this pattern and secretly prayed that the accounting software gods would magically make my dreams come true and come out with software that gave business owners the answers about their business they were after and was fool proof to boot. Well, it seems I am still waiting and so then I had another thought.

The heck with waiting around, I will learn how to code the darn thing myself. Or, if I don’t do all of the coding, at least learn enough about it so that if I started my own company I would have a clue what the engineers were doing and talking about. So I signed up for The Firehose Project. Thus far it has been humbling and really frustrating at times but oddly enough, my brain is starting to catch on. There are lots of terms I don’t know and language I don’t always understand, but I figure if my great grandparents came here from Russia and didn’t speak of lick of English, I can learn this stuff and not have to worry about starving to death in the meantime. Now let’s just hope I can help business owners get the same clarity and simplicity around their numbers.