Our accountant quits, I have to do it myself

Our accountant stands in our workshop with a worried expression. It is not the lack of money. The bank account is well filled. He simply has too little time. Besides, it gets on his nerves how unorganized the receipts are submitted. Food receipts that clearly have nothing to do with work: We were a shared flat and in our opinion the food was at company expense. Not at all: that would have nothing to do with an engineering office. And all the ice cream? We built solar ice-cream vehicles. We needed the ice for the experiments. We also sold ice cream occasionally, except when we were giving it away to appease our stand neighbours at the Geneva Motor Show. And that's exactly why he had had enough of all the discussions and the special regulations. He handed over the bank account, all the receipts and the bookkeeping he had started. We had probably gone too far. There was nothing more we could do. What happens now?
There is no choice: I have to do it myself. From one day to the next, I had very little time left for the construction and design. An acquaintance put me in touch with a trustee who agreed to answer my accounting questions for a handsome fee. I dug through books and spoke with the consultant. We did a complete inventory. In fact, we had a lot of special arrangements. If our ice cream is consumed for tests, it has to be accounted for as own use, if it is sold at the stall, it has to be accounted for as sale of goods. A distinction has to be made between whether the ice cream is given away and consumed on the run or whether it is consumed at our bar. And where to put the drinks we sold at the last festival and which of us has a bar licence? The freezer that the Frisko company had given us, which was used for the experimental ice cream as well as for the private household - how was I supposed to record that in the inventory? For several months I buried myself in the numbers and all the rules and suddenly had an understanding for the hardships of our former accountant.
I tried to encourage my wife at the time, Tina, to help me on the PC. She, however, had an absolute computer allergy at the time: she firmly insisted that she would never work with computers - she would never learn anyway. I tried to teach her with a lot of patience how to switch the devices on and off. Everything I wanted her to learn, she refused on principle and insisted that she could not learn it and did not want to learn anything. She didn't want to answer the constantly ringing phone either, because she couldn't answer any questions anyway. I built up pressure - to no avail. When Tina had cooked for us all in the afternoon, tidied up the kitchen and gone for a walk with her dog, she sat down next to me and started reading or knitting. I let her do as she pleased and she seemed happy.

Then something very strange happened: I was intensely attached to my tables when the phone rang, so I turned around and started to make a call. During this time, Tina sat down at the computer and simply continued booking. Completely astonished, I asked her where she had learned to do that. She operated the computer and booked absolutely correctly. How was that possible? Tina insisted that she couldn't work with PCs and didn't know anything about bookkeeping. She just did what I did and that was very simple.
I didn't understand the world and Tina certainly didn't, but from that moment on I had found a way to involve her. Whenever I was doing something and turned around, Tina would just continue doing exactly what I was doing. In this way, she learned the most important bookings, she made offers, order confirmations, invoices, inventories, she held customer meetings, she was the central enquiry point and in the end she ran the secretariat with several employees. Tina was not only my wife, she was also the one who kept our finances together and managed all the administration. She developed into the most efficient and capable employee. I was finally allowed to do again what I loved doing most: designing and building.

I learned in the process:

• Efficient bookkeeping is the basis of every company
• Sometimes things don't always go my way, but they still go in the right direction