I am an FCMA — a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, and it took me a great many years to get there. I’m proud of it.

People assume that accounting is the dry part of my life and the rest of this site is the interesting part. They have it slightly wrong. What I love about accounting is the engineering: the systems underneath the numbers, the way information moves through a business, and the fact that a well-built set of books is a machine, not a filing cabinet.

CICCO-ARRT is what I am building out of that.

The ambition is genuinely simple to state and hard to do — use emerging technology, and artificial intelligence in particular, to make bookkeeping, admin, and financial management easy for owners of a small business. Not easier. Easy.

I care about small business owners more than I care about the technology. They are the people who carry the most risk and get the least help, who do the VAT return at eleven at night because the day was for customers. And they cannot tell you this month whether they are actually making money.

That’s the problem worth solving, but the challenge is to do it in a simple, easy-to-follow way!

I’m working on it now with a few clients, and I’ll tell you the truth: it’s difficult to stay with. It goes dry. It goes slow. Progress on a thing like this is measured in weeks where nothing visible happens, and I’m a man who lives in a hurry.

But I intend to stay with it and come out the other side with something I can leave behind me. Something made in the accounting world, made with real care, and made creatively in the best sense of that word (rather than the sense that gets accountants struck off).