'Almost certainly most operations accounts and tax filings could be fully auto generated from their bookkeeping - if the bookkeeping was good enough.'
I firmly disagree. I am supposed to be reviewing accounts right now....accruals, prepayments, deferred income, the difference between capital and expense, capital allowances, R&D allowances, dividends vs salaries, consolidation of groups. The average bookkeeper is not expected to work at this level. That all requires judgement and experience and expertise. That is why Xero stop at the easy bit
I wonder if you have worked as an accountant? Or at least took some intro courses in the area? Or at a bare minimum took a look at common corporate financial statements?
This is such a typical dismissive reaction by a person who has ZERO insights into the domain.
If it is so trivial, why don't you do it and disrupt the market? Some very trivial millions are waiting for you to just come and get them, what's holding you back?
I don't do it because I care more about my time these days than about making millions :-) And why would I want to do something that is so obviously boring?
Trivial stuff takes what, an hour, a week, a month at maximum to do? So you are trading the opportunity to be financially independent for the rest of your life for what, your free time on a span of one month? Yeah, that does sound reasonable.
Trivial in the sense of integer multiplication being easy; non-trivial in that it's full of weird & wonderful business rules, many of which are barely written, and strange interactions between different markets and contracts etc.
Half of it is just the business & people skills to extract the necessary information. Harder than you'd think, and that's just asking people for stuff!
I firmly disagree. I am supposed to be reviewing accounts right now....accruals, prepayments, deferred income, the difference between capital and expense, capital allowances, R&D allowances, dividends vs salaries, consolidation of groups. The average bookkeeper is not expected to work at this level. That all requires judgement and experience and expertise. That is why Xero stop at the easy bit