How I learned to stop worrying and love back-office: Enty’s mission
Every business coming to live long needs to define its mission, right? Unlike corporations, small companies do not usually release multipage mission statements. However, we do think about it, re-think and share our missions at the conferences, startup accelerators, investment rounds, etc.
Yo, it’s Enty on the mic! Here is why we exist and what makes us different.
Why Do Things You Don't Want to Do
A company cannot operate without a back-office. For simplicity, let's imagine this portion of a business as a result of the work of three specialists - an accountant, a lawyer, and a personnel officer. They shine behind the scenes and solve loads of routine tasks with taxes, regulations, and so on.
The modern back-office has many problems which we have discussed in detail here. In short, all problems derive from a basic fact — the back-office does not bring profit to the business.
The best way to manage back-office is to optimize it and not let it generate expenses. But anyway, it will not bring you any income. Therefore, an entrepreneur is not interested in doing back-office. They run the business to make a profit, right?
You don't like back-office operations, but you still do this mostly by yourself. Because it is actually excessive to get full-time professionals at this stage whereas a company is normally obliged to prove money transfers, file taxes, apply for VAT, and many other things.
So, you normally do it at a minimum, trying not to spend a lot of money and energy on this. An invoicing subscription here, advice of an outsource lawyer there — most businessmen’ strategy is finally about to chase the deadlines and plug holes. Therefore, the back-office is in such poor condition.
What Happens When Doing Minimum Back-Office
We believe that it is absolutely normal not to know anything about the back-office when you are a businessman. But at the same time, the back office must run like clockwork. Otherwise, the situation will pose multi-hazard risks: fines, risks of losing assets or employees or receiving claims from customers.
And that is what happens when you bail on back office operations. Behind the ~40% of small business owners in the US complaining that accounting is the worst part of the business and SME entrepreneurs in the UK who have legal problems for ~£13.6B, there is a lack of organization in the back office.
But how do many companies across the world still survive? Well, corporations have a pile of money, so they can afford to spend something on the back-office, hire accountants, tax advisers, compliance specialists, etc. They can call one of the ‘Big four’ accounting firms after all.
Meanwhile, small companies use some crutch solutions, but something can always go wrong. Imagine, once you send to your outsource accountant, not the latest version of the invoice edited, or miss one of many deadlines. It will cause a fine or kill a lot of your resources.
And if you postpone the integration, it turns out even worse. Imagine, you have paid for several subscriptions, but in the end, you jump from one to another and still do manual labor downloading your data and collecting it into a new folder on your PC. The prospect looks horrible, right?
How We Came Up With the Solution
Enty’s founders have been working in Deloitte, a back-office giant, and thus we know every single piece of the back office and how they interact with each other.
Then we've been in startups and experienced the hard way how messed up can be running a back-office. After Deloitte, we had to get used to having back-office operations nicely organized and we were not ready to compromise such a poor state just because we’re a startup, not a 2K-employee company.
Our mission is to provide SME entrepreneurs with the correct, reliable, and well-organized back-office as big companies have. Without hassle and penalties. Imagine, your back-office is now automated and seamless, it just does not distract you from earning revenue.
We consider a back-office as a whole. We do not pick a single part of it, for example, accounting or contract management. An entrepreneur may still collect separate subscriptions for accounting, invoicing, legal checks, etc. However, we’re convinced that patchwork automation is sometimes even worse than no automation at all.
The back-office is a complex problem that must be solved with minimal costs for the transfer of information and interaction. And that is what we do on Enty — we pull the data on the company’s operating activities and services needed under one roof and connect it between each other.
And this is not the only thing that distinguishes our approach. We do both reactive and proactive things for your business. Imagine, you have a smartwatch. You go jogging and you want your route to be recorded. This action is reactive.
Then, for example, you’re doing a race and your pulse is increasing too much. The smartwatch detects it and sends you a notification ‘slow down, there’s a risk’ - it’s proactive.
Enty works like this. When you have a need to issue an invoice, create a contract, or hire an employee, it reacts — it gives a solution. But also, since Control Panel maintains your company’s profile, i.e, feels your business pulse, it can be proactive and smoothly navigate you into accounting, legal, and HR.
‘Hi! We start preparing the annual report. It seems like docs #1-3 are missing. Pls, look through it and send it to us” Or, “in two weeks the new e-com rules enter into force. Here is how it can affect your business”. Or, “today it’s the second-to-last day of the month. Let’s do a payroll list for your contractors” etc.
One day an SME entrepreneur will get rid of the back office routines. It will be just invisible to you: a professional accountant, lawyer, and HR are at your disposal when needed (yes, we do have human support as well!), but in general you don’t even see the ‘dirty work’. It’s under the hood.
Enty cares about the back-office, while you do business and change the world.
