You know that burning desire to yell, smash or disappear the entire screen after trying something a hundred million times over three hours because you need to answer simple questions? Now, walk in the shoes of a hotel, and the countless hours spent trying to answer: how is our business doing? Is there something we need to worry about? Is there someone not paying us, *yet*? Did we miss a fundamental mistake that someone will have to nurse and fix in the middle of the night before sending our tax submission? And for that matter, can someone please help with our taxes?
And why are taxes so complicated? When did billing get so complicated? Why are we investing in digitizing everything, but the government wants us to keep paper records for years? And why did Batman wear gray tights? These and other daily, quarterly, or monthly issues add up and it becomes undeniably easy to dislike and even hate the devices, the software, and the apps that populate our day. Because Finance is already so complicated.
The complexity of finance
I hate the complexity of Finance. With its prohibitive acronyms and endless principles. I hate to think that someone must go to work and figure out how to audit trail, massage data, troubleshoot something high tech and then go extend a recommendation to a business based on that frustrating exercise. I hate to think that having a clear and accurate view of the business largely depends on a loyal front desk team who may not know or understand finance… and why should they?
This minor and major hate drives a unique obsession to simplify, to make finance accessible, and to help businesses build the kind of trust that creates life long lasting relationships. Innovation is about emotion, and nothing inspires change more than the frustration of knowing that things could be way better. This is what inspired our Mews Finance mission, to help our customers get paid so that they can focus on giving amazing guest experiences. Build beautiful billing, invoicing, reporting and taxes that are nearly invisible to the non-financial eye, yet transparent to the subject matter experts that draw up insights on the health of the business.
We want to make sure there are fewer faces buried in complicated UIs while meeting and greeting a new guest, and that more time is spent interacting, building relationships. What if in our obsession to simplify finance we could reimagine the way money travels within the organization? What if in reimagining billing, invoicing, reporting and taxes we could help hospitality prevent fraud and increase collaboration and transparency?
A mission to reimagine finance
There is an exhilarating opportunity for us to take a leaf from Elon’s book and reimagine, first principles and all. And for this we must also bring along in this journey regulators, so that speeding up the transformation of finance, with its compliance arm, doesn't become a boring exercise of making the analogue digital, but seizing this opportunity to rethink finance and its compliance differently.
After all, humankind invented money. Surely, we can reimagine a world where Finance is accessible, automated and empowering to the trusted advisors that leverage technology to provide actionable insights. I hate Finance, but mostly the way I don’t hate finance, not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.
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