We use standard colours of blue for companies, red for unincorporated businesses, green for VAT and yellow for payroll. We can add some new colours to reflect the technologies we use.
Optical Character Recognition is our blue sky technology and will be represented by cyan as a computer colour. Narrative Prediction is our golden technology. Reprogramming the function keys to generate custom narrative is our silver technology. Anything new to do with dates is represented by magenta.
The default typeface is Times New Roman. With gold and silver, we will use the typeface Imprint MT Shadow whenever it is possible, because it has a metallic look and resembles TNR.
For every client we will have an aide-memoire to remind us how to process the client from year to year. Usually we will use OCR for bank statements (cyan reminder in TNR), but where we need to drop to typing in by the column, our aide-memoire will remind us how to begin doing this by switching on datepointing, and will plug the usefulness of NP. The aide-memoire is a colourful document which is achieved in Excel by picking the option from a list and using conditional formatting.
For cash records, we can type in by the column (gold reminder in orange + Imprint plugging NP) or by the row (silver reminder in grey + Imprint plugging function keys). We get an additional reminder (magenta + TNR) about what to do with dates. We can add handwritten notes and have the coloured ballpoint pens to do it, with silver being represented by pencil.
The object of this is to encourage the clerk to use our full repertoire of technologies. It is quite possible to enter some cash records and overlook the usefulness of Narrative Prediction. We will just accept that we are “all fingers and thumbs” in the first year and cannot be superhuman, but we will make a note for next year not to overlook it again. As far as we know, some other people are using blue sky technology, but nobody is using the gold, silver or magenta technology, and so we want to press our competitive advantage. The colours we use, blue sky, gold and silver, do represent our estimation of the usefulness of these technologies and the difficulty which our competitors will have in duplicating them.
Life is easy once we have the client data captured on a spreadsheet, which is why we put so much effort into doing it. Subsequent processing is all-electronic and fast all the way through to the final accounts. We normally expect to use OCR for printed matter and typing for handwriting, so we need a range of technologies to cover various possibilities.