May 11, 2017 at 13:01Podcast "Rules of the Game": accounting subtleties for technological (and other) business
Hello, Habr! Today I decided to share with you a transcript of the first issue of the Rules of the Game podcast, in which I communicate with lawyers and tax experts. / photo Alan Cleaver CC
In our introductory issue, you will find a story in which Sergey Yashin, founder and head of the outsourcing accounting services provider Yashin & Partners , shares his experience with myths and misconceptions in the field of accounting.
Alina: Sergey is sitting in front of me. He is a man with a beard, in tattoos, in a T-shirt with a skull [who cares, you can look into his Facebook profile yourself ], and at the same time he is engaged in bookkeeping! How did you decide to do this particular service?
In my opinion, the biggest misconception about bookkeeping, bookkeepers and everything connected with it is that bookkeeping is women in years, retrograde. Bookkeeping cannot offer anything fashionable, modern, interesting.
This is something very boring and very scary.
Sergey: Hello everyone! Most of our fellow citizens and entrepreneurs have the same opinion. And it is quite reasonable, either fortunately or unfortunately.
The story is quite interesting. Once, fate left me to work for an accounting company. She was small, rather “shovels”. The idea that the guys wanted to offer was in the air, but I did not like the implementation. Then I didn’t have a relationship with these guys: they were too conservative.
Then I, realizing that this was already a trend, went to work in a rather large audit and consulting structure and took up the process of building such a service there and at the same time studying its market and capabilities. In the process, several interesting things were found out. I met a large number of colleagues from other audit and outsourcing companies. I saw some stereotypes that for some reason people are following.
It so happened historically that all auditors are strict peasants in ties, they sit at black tables, communicate in obscure phrases, the officialdom of them rushing, and it is impossible to speak normal language with them. An audit, like a tax audit, is always some kind of stress. An accountant is a person with whom it is impossible to communicate without an interpreter.
And when we began to work and transfer different customers to “our” format, it turned out that ordinary entrepreneurs were on the other end of the line. It could be a small family company or a fairly large holding, but people are the same everywhere. And, like all people, it is much easier for them to communicate with friends who are familiar in an ordinary simple language. "Ponte" complicate the process, they complicate the already difficult sphere, which is associated with the constant change of laws in the regulatory framework, in practice.
The classic audit company is a big bureaucratic machine. She focuses on her fictitious plan, and not on what the market and the entrepreneur want. I am very sociable person. I tried to communicate with all clients and find out in what form they want to see the service. I got the feeling that what is happening in this company [in which I worked] is not what the entrepreneur wants.
By that time, we had split up with shareholders on some fairly serious management issues. A year ago, my wife and I decided that it was time for us to act on our own. We have accumulated a lot of expertise - in addition to the professional component. The expertise was in building processes, understanding what works and what doesn't.
We decided that we want this approach [to the work of accounting], which we felt from beginning to end, to provide normal entrepreneurs like us. At first, we didn’t believe in success ... When we just rented an office, we did not even have a legal entity.
The office was removed for their money, they signed a letter of guarantee on a piece of paper, because the legal entity was still registered, and they did not want to miss the premises. I went into the office and thought: “Will it work?” Will not work? The whole market works differently. And we decided to stand out and go our own way. " Then doubts quickly disappeared due to the large number of tasks and workflow.
Now almost a year has passed. I turn around and think: the vector is correct and the trend is correct. Everything that we do is close to modern entrepreneurs - recently both the business and the approach [to its conduct] have changed quite seriously. 10-15 years ago, the main business was construction: selling building materials, something so serious, conservative, as retrograde as an accountant in rings and a dark purple blouse.
Now the format of entrepreneurs is different. One of our clients is a managing partner of a group of companies. He is 26 years old.
People work with the Viber headquarters in Tel Aviv, they have a telecommunications agency. The guys are very young. They are dressed very simply: in stretched T-shirts, in shorts. The guys are not worried about this and are doing quite a big business.
Alina: Cool!
Sergey: We focus on this direction.
Alina: Tell me, please, given that accounting is a conservative area, were there any problems in showing the first customers that this could be interesting, convenient, described in human language? Maybe people came and said: "No, guys, you are too fashionable, I'm afraid of you."
Sergei:I still have the feeling when I come to a meeting in a T-shirt and torn jeans. I think if I went too far, I don’t know who is there. Maybe a man sits in a tie - and we work in different worlds.
There is such a thing, I call it "gravity", when like is attracted to like. Yes, we have quite conservative clients. A client in a jacket looked at me very embarrassed in a red T-shirt, he was expecting another. But it was quite substantive to talk with a person for half an hour, and he realized that we understand the issue. The rest is not important.
Someone understood this and after some time accepted. And someone did not accept this, which means that we are not on the way. There are still classic auditing companies with a classic approach, where someone is comfortable communicating at the level of formalism. And we are attracted to people who understand that all this is a facade, a cover, and it is not so important.
/ photo Zach Copley CC
Alina: Once again, I emphasize for our students that Yashin & Partners does accounting and auditing and helps small and large companies build their businesses so that they do what they like and take out some of the issues related to financial statements and various formal things beyond your day. Please tell me why such a service is really needed and to whom, in your opinion, is it especially important?
Sergey: If we go from general to particular, the general vector of the whole movement in the field of accounting services or accounting in general is an outsourcing format. In Europe and America, 99% of entrepreneurs work with accounting offices and services. There is no such thing as a personal accountant. He may be personal in the family, as a tax consultant, but not as an accountant in the company.
In some countries, there are legislative requirements: at the time of registration of the company, bring a service contract or audit with an audit company within 10 days. This is a guarantee that the entrepreneur will not stumble, will indeed follow the right path in terms of finance.
Russia is still lagging behind other countries in this direction. In the mid-90s, people changed their qualifications, attended 1C courses, accountants, lawyers. It was very fashionable to be a lawyer, but now there are few good lawyers. There are a lot of them in the courts, they are ready to work for free. Also with accountants. The market in Moscow is oversaturated, in the regions, depending on the range, not so.
The problem remains - there are a lot of accountants, a good few of them. Good specialists go to large companies, where there are entire accounting departments, where you can get advanced training at the expense of the employer, where you can sit in the office not with builders, but with accountants. Professional communication of people in this regard pulls.
Or the main part of adequate accountants goes to audit companies for the same reasons. In a small business, there is little work. The entrepreneur believes that if there is not much work, it should cost a little. It advertises the vacancy of the chief accountant with a salary of 30 or 50 thousand rubles.
50 thousand rubles - the salary of an average specialist in Moscow. But, unfortunately, one cannot find a normal accountant for 50 thousand rubles. This is an overrated figure. A good salary starts from 85 thousand rubles.
At the same time, it is clear that in many companies there is nothing to do for money. The entrepreneur understands this very well and is looking for an accountant for some part of the work. Not those professionals who are needed respond to these offers, but those who understand that for 50 thousand rubles they are most likely not to be taken anywhere else. And there are quite a few such people.
At the output, it turns out that in small business companies 5-6 chief accountants change over the year. Each accountant trains to some extent and goes to a cooler company. Nothing can be done with this except to outsource such services. We give the entrepreneur a very cool accountant, while he pays only for the amount of work. And this is the trick!
Alina:Yes, and at the same time, a tough accountant, perhaps, gives the client 20% of all his time, and the rest of the time he deals with other issues, because there are few operations on the small business.
Sergey: Yes. Many students will say that an accountant who comes once a week does the same. But the accountant arrives on the day on which he needs the schedule, and not on the day when something can happen to the client. We work 365 days a year.
We do not have such that we work with one client on Mondays, with another - on Tuesdays. We do not stop work, it goes from morning to evening. We within the company understand the tasks and can delegate them within the accounting group. We distribute the tasks, it turns out that the accountant can run several companies at the same time without losing quality, because there is a team.
Alina: What do you think, is it preferable to turn to accounting services of the type of outsourcing to small companies or can medium and large business operate on such a basis?
Sergey: Big business works on the principle of insourcing. This is the creation of its outsourcing company, which is part of the holding, but is handed down for the state. Many companies, for example, Rosatom, have switched to this.
Alina: In fact, they create spin-offs.
Sergey: They do it themselves, because for large business there are no such contractors whom they could attract for such services. If we take the number one outsourcing company in Russia in terms of turnover, it is unlikely that it would serve Rosatom, while maintaining quality for other customers.
There are a lot of peculiar requirements for this bookkeeping besides reporting. In big business, this does not take root. Small business - yes, firstly, because of cost, and secondly, because of competence. In medium-sized businesses, the motivation for outsourcing may be reluctance to bother, delve into, take on the staff of accountants, financial directors, control everything: you want to give and forget, even if it will be more expensive. In a small business, I would be glad to pay, but there is no budget for one or two good accountants.
And most importantly, if in a large company you can hire financial controllers to check your own accounting, then in a small business the accountant is controlled by the director himself. He picks it up, and whom he took is not clear. How this person works is also not clear. You can only judge by external signs: the accountant sits, 1C opened, brings the documents - there is a feeling that something is happening.
And how it all comes out is visible only when reporting, and not the first one, because we have a limitation period of 3 years, and the requirements from the tax office usually come in a year or two. We will learn about the work of an accountant in a couple of years.
Alina:If we talk about the transition from small business to medium, are there any limits? For example, a company comes to you and says: “We want to use your services,” and you reply: “No, guys, we won’t pull you ...” Are there any limits on the turnover, the number of operations, something else?
Sergey: Here the issue is not the number of operations, the turnover is indirect indicators, but rather the requirements that are presented to the accounting department. For example, if you take the work with the primary documentation, a small company has a workflow in the hundreds of operations per month. These are documents that can be sent by scan, by courier, you can somehow work with them.
When the workflow is calculated as “football fields in a three-story building” (and there are such organizations), it is about how to correctly divide the plots. It is effective to outsource some areas from the very beginning. For example, for many small companies we issue invoices, make payment orders, replace everyone we can: manager, accountant, assistant accountant.
With the growth of the company, some areas are effectively left inside the organization, because iterations and communications at such a level are so significant that they take a lot of time for employees. If we talk about turnovers in which outsourcing is still effective, these are turns up to one or two, with a stretch of three billion rubles a year.
This is adjusted for workflow, that the client is adequate and understands what is effective to keep, and which part related to responsibility, competence, expertise can be outsourced, because this is the work of the team, not just one person.
Alina: There are two polar myths about accounting. The first one is that it is a very difficult area from “nuclear physics”, it’s better not to touch it, it’s somehow brewed there by itself. The second myth is that a small entrepreneur may have a familiar girl with some kind of accounting course at the institute that can do anything.
Accounting and reporting is a big responsibility for a business. The accountant must be able to do a lot of things and be responsible, first of all, for what is being handed over, for those documents that come to the funds. For students who are not immersed in the topic of accounting, the question is: what should an accountant know and be able to? What responsibility does he have?
Sergei:I'll start from the end. There is a moral responsibility to the employer. It is limited to the ephemeral code of ethics of accountants and the conscience of an accountant, because in our country there is 402-ФЗ “On Accounting”, according to which all responsibility for accounting and reporting is solely the general director of the organization.
There is a hired accountant, an incoming accountant, in any case, for everything that this person does, the CEO is responsible financially and criminally. If there is any fraudulent activity, and the investigation established the participation of the chief accountant, this is a group of persons, the responsibility extends.
/ photo by David Goehring CC
Let's take a standard situation - if an accountant submits incorrect statements or does not deliver on time - these are the things that every company faces. All fines and penalties that are charged cannot be deducted from the accountant, there is no legal way to deduct them from the accountant.
The accountant’s responsibility has always been calculated in the amount of, for example, 200 rubles for an incorrect closing of the account - this cannot be verified in any way, and the amount is cheap. Since 2016, these fines have increased. There are official fines from the accountant for incorrect, inaccurate reporting, violation of the rules of maintaining accounting registers. Fines are not paid in favor of the employer, do not compensate, do not reduce [his fines]. They are paid to the budget.
If the director is warming his soul that, in addition to him, the accountant also paid money, you can probably say that this is good. In general, this does not solve the situation.
From the point of view of basic indicators, we have one tax code for all companies: for large and small. The laws are the same for everyone. Due to the overload of tax inspectorates, smaller companies are paid less attention, many [the tax] do not get their hands on, even there are cases of non-delivery of reports.
Recently, those who monitor changes in the field of tax legislation understand that control is very tightened even in terms of reporting. Fines are imposed, which may be significant for small businesses. From the point of view of accounting, it is very important to understand the principles of formation and reporting. The main thing is if the accountant is not as competent as we would like, and the director understands this, it would be nice for the director to control the accountant to study accounting at least as a whole.
We have clients who went to accounting courses to speak the same language with an accountant. Man unlearned a year in order to understand what is happening. It also makes it possible to understand whether an accountant is doing something.
From the latest cases: the company on the simplified account paid the accountant a pretty good salary for 5 years, the director was engaged in sales and did not delve into anything, he was just not interested. The accountant periodically disappeared, didn’t get in touch, the director got tired, he came to us. We asked the accountant for a database and did not receive it within a month. The accountant was hiding.
When they received the base, they understood why: for 5 years, not a single document was held. All reporting was “drawn”, accounting was not conducted, and the person received money. If the director had at least some understanding of what was going on, he could request access to the database, open a turnover sheet and see what was there.
These are the things that in modern society, I think, you need to know. It is like English. I realized, Alina, that you know English very well. At least I can distinguish it from German and French and understand what is at stake. In approximately the same basic vein, I would recommend understanding the tax and accounting situation.
Alina: The main thing is to understand that even if you do not want to understand this, then responsibility will not pass you anyway. If you are the head of the company, it will be on your conscience.
Sergei:Absolutely. An accountant may not be mistaken deliberately - not knowing something. Having delegated authority, unfortunately, we cannot delegate responsibility. Adjusted for the work of an outsourcing company, we understand this injustice and clearly indicate in the contract that all fines and penalties that occur through our fault, we fully compensate and incur.
Probably every self-respecting company should do the same. There are amendments to the limits of this liability, to how compensation will physically occur. Outsourcing is interesting in that it is one of the few work systems that allows delegating responsibility to the contractor and contractor. We are not talking about criminal liability if the company does not pay taxes.
Alina:Outsourcing is not a work of fear, but of conscience, because the environment itself dictates such conditions.
Sergey: Yes, of course. Any outsourcing company, including ours, would like to delete this clause from the contract and say: "We made a mistake - we will apologize, and you will pay." On the one hand - the environment, and on the other ... When we opened the company, we had a table with the movement of money with some planning, but, first of all, we wanted to do well.
When working with clients, we clearly understand that in addition to the accountant, we want to give people a friend. Conscience does not allow us to delete this line from the contract. Many customers do not know about this and do not ask, but we bear this responsibility. If we make a mistake, then our honor will be more expensive than fines.
If the fine is valued more than our honor, then there is an insurance company in which our liability is insured: if we cannot organize such compensation at the expense of our reserves, there is a [agreement with the company] Rosgosstrakh, which has the practice of paying in these areas. They still have the act, and the insurance company compensates for the damage.
/ photo dun_deagh CC
Alina: You talked about what an accountant should know and be able to, and you mentioned that tax legislation is constantly changing: new paragraphs, new articles appear.
For an accountant, it is important not only to correctly report, you must also be in the know about what is appearing, and constantly monitor the “latest news”. It turns out that the accountant is a person who is at the forefront of this whole process.
Sergey: Accountant - let's draw an analogy with the fighting - monitors the target, monitors the rear, watches for the presence of ammunition, communicates via radio with the commander and tries to predict further actions. Being an accountant is not easy.
Many accountants are ignorant of these events. We regularly conduct interviews, and sometimes people answer incorrectly to a question that has been relevant since 2015. We understand that they were stuck in 2013-2014, because there were no such cases in their current company, or they did not know about the changes and are working as usual.
Keeping track of all the changes is a tremendous job. An addition to the changes is the arbitration practice, which, as is the case in our country, is very far from the tax code. If you open the “Consultant” or “Guarantor” help system and see how many changes and amendments to laws relating to entrepreneurs come out daily, you will see that there are from 15 to 47: letters, amendments, changes.
If this number is multiplied by the number of days of the month, we understand that there may be 25% of tax issues. Not a single normal person alone can understand all the nuances, understand how it really works, and how the tax inspectorate will look at it later.
With the growth of our team, we feel a plus of synergy, which is due to the large number of different tasks arising from different specialists. It’s not bad when an accountant is brewed in his own juice, but one head is good, two are better, and ten or twenty is even better. The fact that different situations arise for different clients allows us to create an intellectual fund of accumulated situations and take information from there.
Alina:If a person works as an accountant in one company, he is used to the business that is conducted in this company and the cases that arise there. This does not mean that he can go to your company, if it is engaged in something else, with the same success to work there and constantly understand what is happening new, alone.
Sergey: It happens differently. They take an accountant with a very specific background, and then, when there are difficult moments in reporting, taxation, the accountant, referring to his past work, obviously does wrong according to the principle: "I did it a thousand times - everything will be fine." The reaction to this may be as follows: "Once there, it’s rolled, we will do it now." Although this is not the same thing.
Accountants who brew in the same business have a narrower horizons. For example, accounting at a car dealership is simple, but very specific. A person who has worked for 10-15 years at a car dealership is unlikely to be able to come to a construction company and work efficiently.
Alina: Accounting - a question that can be outsourced, is specific to different businesses. For me, for example, this is a new moment in terms of how all this works.
Sergey: Yes, he [accounting] has specific points. At 60%, these are overlapping things, basic: reporting and accounting. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. There are no different reporting rules for different companies.
We are talking about helping an entrepreneur in these matters, when an accountant is not just a conveyor for issuing reports that are in no way related to business, that do not work for business. They are formal. We say that the accountant is a consultant and adviser, the person who plans and analyzes helps to deal with all this entrepreneur.
Specificity plays a very large role. For example, construction is an interesting industry. Many accountants spit on her, because she is partially "black." Well, how is black? Documents do not arrive on time, they are of rather poor quality, construction superintendents write estimates on leaflets in a box, these leaflets are photographed and sent to the accounting department.
To make an act of KS-2, KS-3, you have to sit and figure it out. Here we work better and better understand what the client wants if the accountant not only worked in a construction company, but knows what construction is. We have an employee who, in addition to accounting, has engineering in construction. It is much easier for him to understand what is happening at the construction site.
If they give him a document that is somehow filled out incorrectly, he doesn’t just blindly accept it, he smiles and asks: “How are you going to collect the house from this number of positions? But here you have a completely different expense. You cannot use such beams here. ”
Joking as a joke, but something like this happens. The client was shocked by the conversation with the accountant, he simply did not expect this. Of course, it is not always possible to understand the industry so deeply, but if it works out, then it’s easier for us to work, and the client feels that we speak the same language.
Alina: The accountant sees the whole logic of the process. This is cool, of course.
Sergey: Ideal, when so. It doesn’t always work, now the business is changing, there are a lot of new industries in which the client immerses us, talks about his business, and we did not even know about it. They did not know that this could somehow build a company or processes.
But it is doubly interesting. We always understand and delve into the client’s internal kitchen, try to come to the client’s office, see what happens to them, how the process works. This is important in order to interact properly in the future.
Alina: You say that you delve into the work of the client, you want to be friends with him. In fact, you work to do well, and not just to hire a lot of people and take a lot of businesses into circulation. And this is the keynote of your entire workflow.
When we talked before this, you mentioned that projects are being pulled to you in some unknown way, the credo of which is “to do well”. How did it happen? How did such a “company of companies” form around you?
Sergei:Yes, "company of companies." On the one hand, for me this is still a mystery, on the other hand, I sincerely believe that accidents are not accidental, everything is happening for something. Probably, when interacting, when communicating, people informally feel some message outside of words. I understand whether we are on the same wave as a person or not.
Why it happens? Probably, because, objectively, some new generation of entrepreneurs is coming to replace those who were in the 90s. In the 90s there was a difficult situation with money, with the economy. Money was a prime necessity. Any business was aimed at frankly “mudding the dough”, and there was interest in this.
Young educated people understand that money is good, but they need something. In addition, there is a process of some constructive activity, from which a person enjoys. The more such people there are, and there really are more of them, we feel this, the stronger our country and businessmen are changing completely different. They just get larger in proportion.
Well, and how they are attracted to us, I don’t know, some kind of magic, magic. We are so tuned in, we are confident that we will find our partners and friends who will be comfortable with us and whom we will help, which we will not abandon. People feel and attracted to it. In this case, probably, other people are attracted to others. Energy Like that.
Alina:Like attracts like. Business for people attracts outsourcing for people.
Sergey: That’s how it turns out. We love people, we do not hide it, we are talking about it. We have the same attitude towards employees. We do not have formalistic relations on the principle of “customer - performer”. We do not poke each other in the contract. About 30% of our client portfolio are my good friends with whom we are friends with families. We are held not so much by a contract as by moral obligations.
Therefore, we, first of all, are tuned in to ensure that those people with whom we work and whom we have promised something receive what we are talking about. Well, the financial component somehow follows this. But this is a separate saga. Just everyone spends at work a certain number of hours of his life. If the first goal is money, it’s probably not quite what you need, you won’t take everything with you. And the process in which a person participates should bring pleasure.
Many clients are surprised: “Accountant is such a profession, you sit, stick in the base. What’s interesting at all? ”And in our country, the girls really get high on this. Some people cannot be driven home at 7-8 pm. They are sitting, they are interested in understanding something. We and employees are the same as we are being selected, fanatics to some extent. This is incorrect, for which everything was intended.
PS If you have any questions that you can ask right here (in the comments), feel free to write. I will give everything to Sergey and get back to you with the answers.
How to listen to an audio version of a podcast:
Myth 1: An accountant cannot explain in “simple words”
Alina: Sergey is sitting in front of me. He is a man with a beard, in tattoos, in a T-shirt with a skull [who cares, you can look into his Facebook profile yourself ], and at the same time he is engaged in bookkeeping! How did you decide to do this particular service?
In my opinion, the biggest misconception about bookkeeping, bookkeepers and everything connected with it is that bookkeeping is women in years, retrograde. Bookkeeping cannot offer anything fashionable, modern, interesting.
This is something very boring and very scary.
Sergey: Hello everyone! Most of our fellow citizens and entrepreneurs have the same opinion. And it is quite reasonable, either fortunately or unfortunately.
The story is quite interesting. Once, fate left me to work for an accounting company. She was small, rather “shovels”. The idea that the guys wanted to offer was in the air, but I did not like the implementation. Then I didn’t have a relationship with these guys: they were too conservative.
Then I, realizing that this was already a trend, went to work in a rather large audit and consulting structure and took up the process of building such a service there and at the same time studying its market and capabilities. In the process, several interesting things were found out. I met a large number of colleagues from other audit and outsourcing companies. I saw some stereotypes that for some reason people are following.
It so happened historically that all auditors are strict peasants in ties, they sit at black tables, communicate in obscure phrases, the officialdom of them rushing, and it is impossible to speak normal language with them. An audit, like a tax audit, is always some kind of stress. An accountant is a person with whom it is impossible to communicate without an interpreter.
And when we began to work and transfer different customers to “our” format, it turned out that ordinary entrepreneurs were on the other end of the line. It could be a small family company or a fairly large holding, but people are the same everywhere. And, like all people, it is much easier for them to communicate with friends who are familiar in an ordinary simple language. "Ponte" complicate the process, they complicate the already difficult sphere, which is associated with the constant change of laws in the regulatory framework, in practice.
The classic audit company is a big bureaucratic machine. She focuses on her fictitious plan, and not on what the market and the entrepreneur want. I am very sociable person. I tried to communicate with all clients and find out in what form they want to see the service. I got the feeling that what is happening in this company [in which I worked] is not what the entrepreneur wants.
It is strange that there was no company on the market that could give this.
By that time, we had split up with shareholders on some fairly serious management issues. A year ago, my wife and I decided that it was time for us to act on our own. We have accumulated a lot of expertise - in addition to the professional component. The expertise was in building processes, understanding what works and what doesn't.
We decided that we want this approach [to the work of accounting], which we felt from beginning to end, to provide normal entrepreneurs like us. At first, we didn’t believe in success ... When we just rented an office, we did not even have a legal entity.
The office was removed for their money, they signed a letter of guarantee on a piece of paper, because the legal entity was still registered, and they did not want to miss the premises. I went into the office and thought: “Will it work?” Will not work? The whole market works differently. And we decided to stand out and go our own way. " Then doubts quickly disappeared due to the large number of tasks and workflow.
Now almost a year has passed. I turn around and think: the vector is correct and the trend is correct. Everything that we do is close to modern entrepreneurs - recently both the business and the approach [to its conduct] have changed quite seriously. 10-15 years ago, the main business was construction: selling building materials, something so serious, conservative, as retrograde as an accountant in rings and a dark purple blouse.
Now the format of entrepreneurs is different. One of our clients is a managing partner of a group of companies. He is 26 years old.
He is engaged in blockchain, neural networks, everything that any entrepreneur from the 90s does not understand: what is it and how can you build a business on this?
People work with the Viber headquarters in Tel Aviv, they have a telecommunications agency. The guys are very young. They are dressed very simply: in stretched T-shirts, in shorts. The guys are not worried about this and are doing quite a big business.
Alina: Cool!
Sergey: We focus on this direction.
Alina: Tell me, please, given that accounting is a conservative area, were there any problems in showing the first customers that this could be interesting, convenient, described in human language? Maybe people came and said: "No, guys, you are too fashionable, I'm afraid of you."
Sergei:I still have the feeling when I come to a meeting in a T-shirt and torn jeans. I think if I went too far, I don’t know who is there. Maybe a man sits in a tie - and we work in different worlds.
There is such a thing, I call it "gravity", when like is attracted to like. Yes, we have quite conservative clients. A client in a jacket looked at me very embarrassed in a red T-shirt, he was expecting another. But it was quite substantive to talk with a person for half an hour, and he realized that we understand the issue. The rest is not important.
Someone understood this and after some time accepted. And someone did not accept this, which means that we are not on the way. There are still classic auditing companies with a classic approach, where someone is comfortable communicating at the level of formalism. And we are attracted to people who understand that all this is a facade, a cover, and it is not so important.
/ photo Zach Copley CC
Myth 2: Outsourcer will not be able to understand your specifics and "nuances"
Alina: Once again, I emphasize for our students that Yashin & Partners does accounting and auditing and helps small and large companies build their businesses so that they do what they like and take out some of the issues related to financial statements and various formal things beyond your day. Please tell me why such a service is really needed and to whom, in your opinion, is it especially important?
Sergey: If we go from general to particular, the general vector of the whole movement in the field of accounting services or accounting in general is an outsourcing format. In Europe and America, 99% of entrepreneurs work with accounting offices and services. There is no such thing as a personal accountant. He may be personal in the family, as a tax consultant, but not as an accountant in the company.
In some countries, there are legislative requirements: at the time of registration of the company, bring a service contract or audit with an audit company within 10 days. This is a guarantee that the entrepreneur will not stumble, will indeed follow the right path in terms of finance.
Russia is still lagging behind other countries in this direction. In the mid-90s, people changed their qualifications, attended 1C courses, accountants, lawyers. It was very fashionable to be a lawyer, but now there are few good lawyers. There are a lot of them in the courts, they are ready to work for free. Also with accountants. The market in Moscow is oversaturated, in the regions, depending on the range, not so.
The problem remains - there are a lot of accountants, a good few of them. Good specialists go to large companies, where there are entire accounting departments, where you can get advanced training at the expense of the employer, where you can sit in the office not with builders, but with accountants. Professional communication of people in this regard pulls.
Or the main part of adequate accountants goes to audit companies for the same reasons. In a small business, there is little work. The entrepreneur believes that if there is not much work, it should cost a little. It advertises the vacancy of the chief accountant with a salary of 30 or 50 thousand rubles.
50 thousand rubles - the salary of an average specialist in Moscow. But, unfortunately, one cannot find a normal accountant for 50 thousand rubles. This is an overrated figure. A good salary starts from 85 thousand rubles.
At the same time, it is clear that in many companies there is nothing to do for money. The entrepreneur understands this very well and is looking for an accountant for some part of the work. Not those professionals who are needed respond to these offers, but those who understand that for 50 thousand rubles they are most likely not to be taken anywhere else. And there are quite a few such people.
At the output, it turns out that in small business companies 5-6 chief accountants change over the year. Each accountant trains to some extent and goes to a cooler company. Nothing can be done with this except to outsource such services. We give the entrepreneur a very cool accountant, while he pays only for the amount of work. And this is the trick!
Alina:Yes, and at the same time, a tough accountant, perhaps, gives the client 20% of all his time, and the rest of the time he deals with other issues, because there are few operations on the small business.
Sergey: Yes. Many students will say that an accountant who comes once a week does the same. But the accountant arrives on the day on which he needs the schedule, and not on the day when something can happen to the client. We work 365 days a year.
We do not have such that we work with one client on Mondays, with another - on Tuesdays. We do not stop work, it goes from morning to evening. We within the company understand the tasks and can delegate them within the accounting group. We distribute the tasks, it turns out that the accountant can run several companies at the same time without losing quality, because there is a team.
Alina: What do you think, is it preferable to turn to accounting services of the type of outsourcing to small companies or can medium and large business operate on such a basis?
Sergey: Big business works on the principle of insourcing. This is the creation of its outsourcing company, which is part of the holding, but is handed down for the state. Many companies, for example, Rosatom, have switched to this.
Alina: In fact, they create spin-offs.
Sergey: They do it themselves, because for large business there are no such contractors whom they could attract for such services. If we take the number one outsourcing company in Russia in terms of turnover, it is unlikely that it would serve Rosatom, while maintaining quality for other customers.
There are a lot of peculiar requirements for this bookkeeping besides reporting. In big business, this does not take root. Small business - yes, firstly, because of cost, and secondly, because of competence. In medium-sized businesses, the motivation for outsourcing may be reluctance to bother, delve into, take on the staff of accountants, financial directors, control everything: you want to give and forget, even if it will be more expensive. In a small business, I would be glad to pay, but there is no budget for one or two good accountants.
And most importantly, if in a large company you can hire financial controllers to check your own accounting, then in a small business the accountant is controlled by the director himself. He picks it up, and whom he took is not clear. How this person works is also not clear. You can only judge by external signs: the accountant sits, 1C opened, brings the documents - there is a feeling that something is happening.
And how it all comes out is visible only when reporting, and not the first one, because we have a limitation period of 3 years, and the requirements from the tax office usually come in a year or two. We will learn about the work of an accountant in a couple of years.
Alina:If we talk about the transition from small business to medium, are there any limits? For example, a company comes to you and says: “We want to use your services,” and you reply: “No, guys, we won’t pull you ...” Are there any limits on the turnover, the number of operations, something else?
Sergey: Here the issue is not the number of operations, the turnover is indirect indicators, but rather the requirements that are presented to the accounting department. For example, if you take the work with the primary documentation, a small company has a workflow in the hundreds of operations per month. These are documents that can be sent by scan, by courier, you can somehow work with them.
When the workflow is calculated as “football fields in a three-story building” (and there are such organizations), it is about how to correctly divide the plots. It is effective to outsource some areas from the very beginning. For example, for many small companies we issue invoices, make payment orders, replace everyone we can: manager, accountant, assistant accountant.
With the growth of the company, some areas are effectively left inside the organization, because iterations and communications at such a level are so significant that they take a lot of time for employees. If we talk about turnovers in which outsourcing is still effective, these are turns up to one or two, with a stretch of three billion rubles a year.
This is adjusted for workflow, that the client is adequate and understands what is effective to keep, and which part related to responsibility, competence, expertise can be outsourced, because this is the work of the team, not just one person.
Myth 3: “I have a friend of a girl - she’ll figure it out”
Alina: There are two polar myths about accounting. The first one is that it is a very difficult area from “nuclear physics”, it’s better not to touch it, it’s somehow brewed there by itself. The second myth is that a small entrepreneur may have a familiar girl with some kind of accounting course at the institute that can do anything.
Accounting and reporting is a big responsibility for a business. The accountant must be able to do a lot of things and be responsible, first of all, for what is being handed over, for those documents that come to the funds. For students who are not immersed in the topic of accounting, the question is: what should an accountant know and be able to? What responsibility does he have?
Sergei:I'll start from the end. There is a moral responsibility to the employer. It is limited to the ephemeral code of ethics of accountants and the conscience of an accountant, because in our country there is 402-ФЗ “On Accounting”, according to which all responsibility for accounting and reporting is solely the general director of the organization.
There is a hired accountant, an incoming accountant, in any case, for everything that this person does, the CEO is responsible financially and criminally. If there is any fraudulent activity, and the investigation established the participation of the chief accountant, this is a group of persons, the responsibility extends.
/ photo by David Goehring CC
Let's take a standard situation - if an accountant submits incorrect statements or does not deliver on time - these are the things that every company faces. All fines and penalties that are charged cannot be deducted from the accountant, there is no legal way to deduct them from the accountant.
The accountant’s responsibility has always been calculated in the amount of, for example, 200 rubles for an incorrect closing of the account - this cannot be verified in any way, and the amount is cheap. Since 2016, these fines have increased. There are official fines from the accountant for incorrect, inaccurate reporting, violation of the rules of maintaining accounting registers. Fines are not paid in favor of the employer, do not compensate, do not reduce [his fines]. They are paid to the budget.
If the director is warming his soul that, in addition to him, the accountant also paid money, you can probably say that this is good. In general, this does not solve the situation.
From the point of view of basic indicators, we have one tax code for all companies: for large and small. The laws are the same for everyone. Due to the overload of tax inspectorates, smaller companies are paid less attention, many [the tax] do not get their hands on, even there are cases of non-delivery of reports.
One of the last cases: a young man discovered an IP. And we now have a Regulation on tax holidays for new entrepreneurs: people do not pay taxes for 2 years if they fall under a certain OKVED. A friend has a cafe. There he pours tea, sells juices. He read that there are OKVEDy production of teas and juices, and read something about the tax holidays. But only the production of tea is not a tea bag to brew in a cup, but collected from a bush, dried, packaged.
He has been working for a year and a half and does not pay taxes at all, honestly thinking that he is on tax holidays. And he has to pay taxes. But he did not receive a single demand, no one wrote, because he is in line, maybe the 586th or 1586th, and his hands have not yet reached him. But the rules are the same. In a small company, correctly set up accounting is the basis for the fact that in the future, when changing accounts, this accounting will be continued adequately.
Recently, those who monitor changes in the field of tax legislation understand that control is very tightened even in terms of reporting. Fines are imposed, which may be significant for small businesses. From the point of view of accounting, it is very important to understand the principles of formation and reporting. The main thing is if the accountant is not as competent as we would like, and the director understands this, it would be nice for the director to control the accountant to study accounting at least as a whole.
We have clients who went to accounting courses to speak the same language with an accountant. Man unlearned a year in order to understand what is happening. It also makes it possible to understand whether an accountant is doing something.
From the latest cases: the company on the simplified account paid the accountant a pretty good salary for 5 years, the director was engaged in sales and did not delve into anything, he was just not interested. The accountant periodically disappeared, didn’t get in touch, the director got tired, he came to us. We asked the accountant for a database and did not receive it within a month. The accountant was hiding.
When they received the base, they understood why: for 5 years, not a single document was held. All reporting was “drawn”, accounting was not conducted, and the person received money. If the director had at least some understanding of what was going on, he could request access to the database, open a turnover sheet and see what was there.
These are the things that in modern society, I think, you need to know. It is like English. I realized, Alina, that you know English very well. At least I can distinguish it from German and French and understand what is at stake. In approximately the same basic vein, I would recommend understanding the tax and accounting situation.
Alina: The main thing is to understand that even if you do not want to understand this, then responsibility will not pass you anyway. If you are the head of the company, it will be on your conscience.
Sergei:Absolutely. An accountant may not be mistaken deliberately - not knowing something. Having delegated authority, unfortunately, we cannot delegate responsibility. Adjusted for the work of an outsourcing company, we understand this injustice and clearly indicate in the contract that all fines and penalties that occur through our fault, we fully compensate and incur.
Probably every self-respecting company should do the same. There are amendments to the limits of this liability, to how compensation will physically occur. Outsourcing is interesting in that it is one of the few work systems that allows delegating responsibility to the contractor and contractor. We are not talking about criminal liability if the company does not pay taxes.
Alina:Outsourcing is not a work of fear, but of conscience, because the environment itself dictates such conditions.
Sergey: Yes, of course. Any outsourcing company, including ours, would like to delete this clause from the contract and say: "We made a mistake - we will apologize, and you will pay." On the one hand - the environment, and on the other ... When we opened the company, we had a table with the movement of money with some planning, but, first of all, we wanted to do well.
When working with clients, we clearly understand that in addition to the accountant, we want to give people a friend. Conscience does not allow us to delete this line from the contract. Many customers do not know about this and do not ask, but we bear this responsibility. If we make a mistake, then our honor will be more expensive than fines.
If the fine is valued more than our honor, then there is an insurance company in which our liability is insured: if we cannot organize such compensation at the expense of our reserves, there is a [agreement with the company] Rosgosstrakh, which has the practice of paying in these areas. They still have the act, and the insurance company compensates for the damage.
/ photo dun_deagh CC
Myth 4: “I did it a thousand times - everything will be fine”
Alina: You talked about what an accountant should know and be able to, and you mentioned that tax legislation is constantly changing: new paragraphs, new articles appear.
For an accountant, it is important not only to correctly report, you must also be in the know about what is appearing, and constantly monitor the “latest news”. It turns out that the accountant is a person who is at the forefront of this whole process.
Sergey: Accountant - let's draw an analogy with the fighting - monitors the target, monitors the rear, watches for the presence of ammunition, communicates via radio with the commander and tries to predict further actions. Being an accountant is not easy.
Many accountants are ignorant of these events. We regularly conduct interviews, and sometimes people answer incorrectly to a question that has been relevant since 2015. We understand that they were stuck in 2013-2014, because there were no such cases in their current company, or they did not know about the changes and are working as usual.
Keeping track of all the changes is a tremendous job. An addition to the changes is the arbitration practice, which, as is the case in our country, is very far from the tax code. If you open the “Consultant” or “Guarantor” help system and see how many changes and amendments to laws relating to entrepreneurs come out daily, you will see that there are from 15 to 47: letters, amendments, changes.
If this number is multiplied by the number of days of the month, we understand that there may be 25% of tax issues. Not a single normal person alone can understand all the nuances, understand how it really works, and how the tax inspectorate will look at it later.
With the growth of our team, we feel a plus of synergy, which is due to the large number of different tasks arising from different specialists. It’s not bad when an accountant is brewed in his own juice, but one head is good, two are better, and ten or twenty is even better. The fact that different situations arise for different clients allows us to create an intellectual fund of accumulated situations and take information from there.
Alina:If a person works as an accountant in one company, he is used to the business that is conducted in this company and the cases that arise there. This does not mean that he can go to your company, if it is engaged in something else, with the same success to work there and constantly understand what is happening new, alone.
Sergey: It happens differently. They take an accountant with a very specific background, and then, when there are difficult moments in reporting, taxation, the accountant, referring to his past work, obviously does wrong according to the principle: "I did it a thousand times - everything will be fine." The reaction to this may be as follows: "Once there, it’s rolled, we will do it now." Although this is not the same thing.
Accountants who brew in the same business have a narrower horizons. For example, accounting at a car dealership is simple, but very specific. A person who has worked for 10-15 years at a car dealership is unlikely to be able to come to a construction company and work efficiently.
Alina: Accounting - a question that can be outsourced, is specific to different businesses. For me, for example, this is a new moment in terms of how all this works.
Sergey: Yes, he [accounting] has specific points. At 60%, these are overlapping things, basic: reporting and accounting. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. There are no different reporting rules for different companies.
We are talking about helping an entrepreneur in these matters, when an accountant is not just a conveyor for issuing reports that are in no way related to business, that do not work for business. They are formal. We say that the accountant is a consultant and adviser, the person who plans and analyzes helps to deal with all this entrepreneur.
Specificity plays a very large role. For example, construction is an interesting industry. Many accountants spit on her, because she is partially "black." Well, how is black? Documents do not arrive on time, they are of rather poor quality, construction superintendents write estimates on leaflets in a box, these leaflets are photographed and sent to the accounting department.
To make an act of KS-2, KS-3, you have to sit and figure it out. Here we work better and better understand what the client wants if the accountant not only worked in a construction company, but knows what construction is. We have an employee who, in addition to accounting, has engineering in construction. It is much easier for him to understand what is happening at the construction site.
If they give him a document that is somehow filled out incorrectly, he doesn’t just blindly accept it, he smiles and asks: “How are you going to collect the house from this number of positions? But here you have a completely different expense. You cannot use such beams here. ”
Joking as a joke, but something like this happens. The client was shocked by the conversation with the accountant, he simply did not expect this. Of course, it is not always possible to understand the industry so deeply, but if it works out, then it’s easier for us to work, and the client feels that we speak the same language.
Alina: The accountant sees the whole logic of the process. This is cool, of course.
Sergey: Ideal, when so. It doesn’t always work, now the business is changing, there are a lot of new industries in which the client immerses us, talks about his business, and we did not even know about it. They did not know that this could somehow build a company or processes.
But it is doubly interesting. We always understand and delve into the client’s internal kitchen, try to come to the client’s office, see what happens to them, how the process works. This is important in order to interact properly in the future.
Alina: You say that you delve into the work of the client, you want to be friends with him. In fact, you work to do well, and not just to hire a lot of people and take a lot of businesses into circulation. And this is the keynote of your entire workflow.
When we talked before this, you mentioned that projects are being pulled to you in some unknown way, the credo of which is “to do well”. How did it happen? How did such a “company of companies” form around you?
Sergei:Yes, "company of companies." On the one hand, for me this is still a mystery, on the other hand, I sincerely believe that accidents are not accidental, everything is happening for something. Probably, when interacting, when communicating, people informally feel some message outside of words. I understand whether we are on the same wave as a person or not.
Why it happens? Probably, because, objectively, some new generation of entrepreneurs is coming to replace those who were in the 90s. In the 90s there was a difficult situation with money, with the economy. Money was a prime necessity. Any business was aimed at frankly “mudding the dough”, and there was interest in this.
Young educated people understand that money is good, but they need something. In addition, there is a process of some constructive activity, from which a person enjoys. The more such people there are, and there really are more of them, we feel this, the stronger our country and businessmen are changing completely different. They just get larger in proportion.
Well, and how they are attracted to us, I don’t know, some kind of magic, magic. We are so tuned in, we are confident that we will find our partners and friends who will be comfortable with us and whom we will help, which we will not abandon. People feel and attracted to it. In this case, probably, other people are attracted to others. Energy Like that.
Alina:Like attracts like. Business for people attracts outsourcing for people.
Sergey: That’s how it turns out. We love people, we do not hide it, we are talking about it. We have the same attitude towards employees. We do not have formalistic relations on the principle of “customer - performer”. We do not poke each other in the contract. About 30% of our client portfolio are my good friends with whom we are friends with families. We are held not so much by a contract as by moral obligations.
Therefore, we, first of all, are tuned in to ensure that those people with whom we work and whom we have promised something receive what we are talking about. Well, the financial component somehow follows this. But this is a separate saga. Just everyone spends at work a certain number of hours of his life. If the first goal is money, it’s probably not quite what you need, you won’t take everything with you. And the process in which a person participates should bring pleasure.
Many clients are surprised: “Accountant is such a profession, you sit, stick in the base. What’s interesting at all? ”And in our country, the girls really get high on this. Some people cannot be driven home at 7-8 pm. They are sitting, they are interested in understanding something. We and employees are the same as we are being selected, fanatics to some extent. This is incorrect, for which everything was intended.
PS If you have any questions that you can ask right here (in the comments), feel free to write. I will give everything to Sergey and get back to you with the answers.