The time we were spending was hers

At the end of August I counted how many times she had tested KAZENA Books for us. The number was 22. What I was counting was not the reports we received. It was the number of times we put our own work into someone else's hands. Of those 22, there were 14 where we prepared nothing at all and sent the build with a single line: please give it a try.

V is an accountant in Jakarta. She tests our books with the live data of her own firm. There is no contract. No invoice ever arrives. So far we have paid her nothing. The reports come anyway, every time: where her hand stopped on a screen, which word does not match how the work is actually spoken about, which order of steps will not survive a real month.

What made me count was the evening of 19 August. The build we sent that afternoon stopped on the first screen. Nothing past the login. She had set aside time after her own day's work, and all that time bought was the knowledge that she could not get in. What came back was 1 line. I could not get in today. The cause was in our own release settings, and opening it ourselves once before sending would have told us.

After that I looked again at how we had been asking. Build a version, send it, write please test this. That is the comfortable way to ask, for us. Deciding what to test, writing down what you notice, translating it into words we will understand — all of it becomes the other person's work. Ours was the sending.

In July and August, 47 reports came from her. Of those, 9 were things our own machines could have found first: a translated string missing in 1 place, thousands separators differing between screens, a margin appearing on the first printed page. None of them needed a person. Every report a machine could have produced was time taken away from the reports only a person can produce.

The reports only she can produce look like this. Some firms put a 0 where a field would otherwise be left blank. A document whose letterhead is not laid out properly is sometimes handed back. Some people collect withholding slips monthly, others issue one at every payment. None of it is written in the regulations. It is the kind of thing we could sit and think about behind a screen for a lifetime and never arrive at.

So I thought about what we can return. The first thing is telling her what became of each report. Before, a report arrived, went into our list, and from where she sat the story ended there. Whether we fixed it or decided not to stayed inside our own walls. Now every report gets an answer within 1 working day: we are fixing it, we are not fixing it, or this is how we intend to fix it. And when a new build goes out, we write which of her reports it carries.

The second is that we open the build ourselves before sending it. On a freshly created account, we go from signing up to issuing the first invoice. It takes about 10 minutes. What happened on 19 August would have been stopped in those 10 minutes. Spend 10 minutes of your own working day before you spend an evening of someone else's. We had the order backwards.

Before anything ships, E checks it on his own device too. He is in a small town some way outside Jakarta, and he tests on the connection there and on the handsets people actually use there. A fibre line in a Jakarta office being fine and the signal in his town being fine are 2 different facts. A build that stops at his end never reaches V.

The third is making each round cost less. Now we write out 3 specific things we want looked at, and we also write where it is fine to stop. Unless you say this far is enough in advance, a conscientious person will go to the end. We prepare the test account ourselves and load it with data shaped like her firm's. The target is 30 minutes. We ask for 30 minutes, not for a whole evening.

About money. I told her we wanted to pay for her time, and she would not take it. Her reason was that she wants this to become something she can use in her own work. I decided that being refused is not permission to keep taking. We ask at most once a week, and not at all in the weeks near a filing deadline. We do not reach into an accounting firm's month end for our own convenience. It sounds obvious, but unless it is written down as a rule, our convenience always arrives first.

There are things we have not returned. What she is using is real data. The act of testing carries a chance of damaging her firm's records. Once, we had her try the bulk import feature on her live books. That was not a request we should have made in that form. Now we prepare a copy environment, and anything that deletes is never tested against the real thing.

One more thing, to be careful. I am not a tax accountant. The documents and deadlines mentioned here are only what I have been taught in the field, and both the rules and the forms keep changing. Please confirm anything you actually act on with a professional.

A request to close with. If you have ever tested something of ours, there is something I would like to know: what took your time that day. It can be a screen that would not move, or an explanation of ours that was not enough. Asking someone to test is asking them to carry a cost that belongs to us. The least we can do is count what they carried.