DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 24

Invoices Questioned, Value Invisible

The outstanding debtors report sat on the screen in front of me, arranged neatly from the mildly irritating to the increasingly unlikely. The software did not use those descriptions, of course, preferring thirty days, sixty days, ninety days and over ninety days, as though age alone explained the condition of an account. Accounting software has never recognised the emotional stages of chasing your own money, nor has it found a column for promises made last Tuesday and forgotten by Thursday. I worked down the list, recognising names, excuses and patterns, and reached for the telephone to begin another round of asking people to pay for work they had already received.

“Next week,” the first client said, with the confidence of a man who appeared to have been granted some control over the calendar. He explained that a payment was due from one of his customers and, once that arrived, our account would be sorted, which would have been more reassuring had I not heard the same explanation the week before. On that occasion, the money had been arriving on Friday, although Friday had apparently passed without leaving any money behind. I made the note in the system, because accountants record promises even when experience has already placed a fairly modest value upon them.

The next call produced another version of the same answer. There had been an administrative oversight, the bookkeeper was away, the person authorised to approve payments had not been in, or the invoice had somehow missed the payment run despite having participated in several previous payment runs without success. There was always a process, a person or an event standing between the client and the simple act of paying us. None of those obstacles had prevented them ringing when they needed something, and urgency seemed to travel in only one direction.

By the fourth call, I was no longer listening closely to the words because the words had become too familiar. I was listening for the change in tone that usually separated a genuine cash-flow problem from a client who was simply managing me until I went away. Some were embarrassed and direct, admitted they were short and proposed something they could realistically do, and I could work with that. Others spoke as though their continued refusal to pay was an inconvenience we were jointly enduring rather than a decision being made entirely at our expense.

There was a peculiar humility expected of a professional chasing an account. I was required to remain courteous, understanding and almost apologetic, as though seeking payment might damage the relationship more than withholding it. The client could delay, ignore statements and break promises, but I was expected to choose my words carefully in case I appeared unreasonable or insufficiently sensitive to the pressures of running a business. Apparently, asking someone to honour an agreement was more confronting than failing to honour it, which was another business principle I had somehow missed during my training.

I would finish the calls and look again at the report, knowing before I did that many of the names would still be there the following month. It always seemed to be the same clients requiring the same reminders: the plumber, the service station owner and the photographer, each with another explanation for why payment would arrive next week rather than this one. Over the years, those repeated promises and unpaid accounts would eventually cost me more than $250,000 in fees that had been earned, invoiced and never collected. That figure did not arrive in one dramatic collapse but accumulated through dozens of smaller decisions to be patient, to believe another promise and to avoid pushing too hard because the client was having a difficult time.

The total at the bottom of the report was therefore never just a number, because I knew what sat behind it and what had to be paid regardless of whether our clients had remembered us. There were wages, rent, software accounts, professional subscriptions, insurance, equipment, tax, superannuation and all the other costs that did not accept “next week” as a recognised form of currency. Banks Consultancy might have been an accounting practice, but that did not make it immune from arithmetic, nor did understanding other people’s cash-flow problems create the money needed to meet our own. In fact, understanding the problem could make it worse, because knowledge provided an endless supply of reasons to be patient when patience had already become part of the loss.

There were also those micro clients who thought they needed an accountant when what they really needed was employment. Their businesses did not produce enough to support the life they expected from them, but the idea of returning to wages felt like failure, so the business continued while the unpaid bills gathered around it. They were often the clients who struggled most with the difference between the lifestyle they wanted and the means available to provide it. In their minds, they could not afford our services at the rates we charged, yet they also could not afford not to have us because someone still had to keep the records, lodge the returns and explain why the numbers refused to improve.

I understood the pride behind that resistance because I had spent much of my own life believing work should be made to succeed through effort, thought and persistence. I also knew that not every difficult period meant a business should be closed, and some clients genuinely needed time and support before the situation improved. The problem was that sympathy could not turn a business with no margin into one capable of paying professional fees. We could explain the figures, restructure the work and reduce the cost where possible, but there were times when the most honest advice was also the advice least likely to be welcomed.

We had always tried to pay our own bills on time, as far as we were able. That was not a marketing promise or a slogan painted on a wall, but a fairly basic belief Robyn and I carried into the practice from our own lives. If somebody had provided a service or supplied something we had agreed to buy, the money was theirs, even if parting with it was inconvenient at the time. We might not always have enjoyed paying the account, but enjoyment had never been included in the terms, and our discomfort did not somehow transfer the obligation back to the person who had done the work.

That belief sat comfortably beside the four pillars on which Banks Consultancy had been built. The first placed advice before compliance, the second relationships before transactions, the third courage before convenience, and the fourth stewardship before extraction. They may have been presented as the guiding principles of the practice, but they were never simply business language devised for a brochure or a planning day. Each one described a standard we expected of ourselves before we ever expected a client to notice it.

The pillars reflected the personal ideals Robyn and I had tried to live by long before anyone thought to reduce them to four neat statements. We believed people should be helped rather than processed, relationships should matter more than the immediate dollar, difficult truths should be spoken when silence would be easier, and anything entrusted to us should be left in better shape than we found it. Those ideas belonged as much to our marriage, our family and the way we dealt with people as they did to Banks Consultancy. We did not always meet the standard, because ideals are easier to write than to live, but we knew when we had fallen short and usually worried about it longer than anyone else did.

Jon Dale helped us identify what we were already trying to do and encouraged us to say it clearly enough that clients and staff could understand it. He did not invent the pillars and then force the practice to behave accordingly, which would have been the usual fate of values created in a planning session and forgotten by morning tea. He listened to how we spoke about clients, watched the way we became involved in their problems and recognised that we were not content to accept records, produce accounts and return the material without becoming involved in what the numbers meant. He helped us find words for something that had been operating more as instinct than policy.

We intended to advise, build relationships, say difficult things and leave the client in a better position than the one in which we found them. To me, that was not merely a reasonable way to operate but the expected way and, until experience taught me otherwise, something close to the norm. We would provide quality work, meet our obligations, pay people properly and treat our clients’ businesses as though their survival mattered. Anything less would have felt like a failure of both the practice and the personal values Robyn and I had brought into it.

Jon recognised that difference before we properly understood how to describe it ourselves. He did not arrive with a clever slogan and search for a business willing to fit beneath it; he watched how we worked and told us, “You’re not your ordinary accountant, and you shouldn’t pretend to be.” From that came the phrase “Not Your Ordinary Accountant”, which later became part of the way we explained ourselves to the market. It was not intended to suggest that other accountants were ordinary people doing ordinary work while I stood on a nearby hill displaying uncommon brilliance, because that would have been both arrogant and untrue.

The phrase was tested with clients, one of whom reduced our value to the wonderfully plain description that I “solved his accounting problems”. There was no language about strategic integration, holistic advisory frameworks or any of the other expressions businesses use when they want a simple service to sound expensive. He had a problem, I helped solve it, and in his mind that was the difference. “Not Your Ordinary Accountant” therefore came to mean that accounting involved more than producing forms, recording history and sending an invoice, even though those parts still had to be done correctly and on time.

We assumed clients would recognise that commitment and deal with us according to the same ordinary standards of fairness, responsibility and respect that we regarded as automatic. I did not expect gratitude for every hour, nor did I imagine that every client would become a friend merely because we had taken their business seriously. I did, however, expect that work properly performed would be paid for and that promises would carry some weight. It took me far too long to understand that what Robyn and I considered normal was not necessarily normal at all, and that the rest of the world had neither attended the same planning session nor felt bound by the conclusions we had reached there.

For many years, like most professional practices, we charged by the hour. Time was recorded, multiplied by an hourly rate and converted into an invoice, giving everyone the comforting impression that value had been measured scientifically. Six hours of work became six hours of fees, whether those hours involved careful judgement, repetitive processing or staring at incomplete records while wondering where the rest of the bank statements had gone. The method was familiar, defensible and flawed, which probably explains why the professions relied upon it for so long.

Hourly billing rewarded slowness in theory and punished efficiency in practice. If I recognised a problem quickly because I had spent decades learning how to recognise it, the client received a smaller bill than if I had needed three days to work out what was happening. Experience allowed me to solve the problem faster, then required me to charge less for the privilege. It was a commercial model apparently designed by someone who believed expertise should carry a penalty and confusion should be billed at full rates.

The system also reduced professional work to its most visible activity. A client could understand an hour spent preparing a tax return because there was a return at the end of it, and they could understand time entering transactions or reconciling accounts because something tangible appeared. The thinking that prevented a poor decision, recognised an emerging risk or joined several unrelated facts into one useful conclusion was much harder to place on a time sheet. It existed before the words were spoken and often continued afterwards, but only the meeting had a beginning and an end that could be recorded neatly.

Jon introduced us to what we called the Flat Rate Calculator. On the surface, it was a spreadsheet containing jobs, tasks, expected times, staff costs, overheads and the assumptions required to arrive at a sensible fixed price. It allowed us to quote work in advance, giving clients certainty about the cost of the agreed services while allowing us to understand whether the fee would support the work required. It also gave us a way to compare actual staff performance with the assumptions on which the quote had been based, which was useful provided the assumptions had some connection with reality.

The calculator included something called “faffing time”, probably the most honest accounting term I encountered in more than forty years. Faffing time recognised that work did not move smoothly from the first document to the finished accounts, no matter how attractive the workflow diagram looked. Information was missing, questions went unanswered, files were put down, telephone calls interrupted concentration and jobs had to be restarted after the person handling them had spent three days working on something else. Human beings were involved, which usually prevented any process from behaving as neatly as the consultant’s arrows suggested.

At first, the allowance looked suspiciously like padding. Accountants are trained to distrust numbers that cannot be supported, and “faffing” did not sound like a category likely to impress an auditor or survive a serious discussion about productivity. Once we began monitoring jobs properly, however, we discovered the allowance was not generous enough. The interruption was real, the restart time was real and the cost of waiting for information was being carried by us whether or not the client recognised it.

The calculator helped us understand production in a way hourly billing never had. We could see where work became stuck, where the original assumptions were wrong and whether a staff member needed assistance or simply needed the client to answer an email. It provided certainty, discipline and a reasonably fair way of setting fees for work that could be identified in advance. For the services that fitted within its boundaries, it worked extremely well and gave both sides a clearer understanding of what had been agreed.

The difficulty lay outside those boundaries, where the work was less visible and often more important. The calculator could price a tax return, a set of accounts, a BAS or a regular compliance service because the steps could be identified and repeated. It struggled with the client who rang unexpectedly about a problem that had been developing quietly for three years and now needed an answer before lunch. It could not easily measure the weight of knowing that one careless response might affect a family, a business, several employees and the security of assets accumulated over a lifetime.

Those were the services most likely to be questioned because they did not arrive in a familiar package. The client knew the annual accounts were included but assumed the urgent meeting about buying another business must also be included, because both matters involved numbers and happened in the same office. They knew the agreed fee covered the BAS but thought several telephone calls about a growing tax debt were part of the same general arrangement. The engagement letter might say otherwise, but engagement letters are often treated like software terms and conditions, accepted immediately and remembered only when an invoice appears.

“Wasn’t this included in our normal fee?” became a familiar opening, usually delivered with enough surprise to suggest I had slipped an entirely unrelated charge into the account. Sometimes it was a genuine question, because professional service agreements could be confusing and we did provide more than many practices. At other times, it was the beginning of a negotiation the client had decided to conduct after receiving the benefit. They had not asked about the cost while the problem was urgent, but urgency had a habit of disappearing once the answer was safely in their possession.

I would explain what the agreed fee covered and what additional work had been required. There might have been meetings, correspondence, projections, negotiations with the Tax Office, discussions with a bank or the reconstruction of records that had never been maintained properly. Often the fee did not reflect every hour spent because we had already reduced it before sending the invoice, either through judgement, goodwill or the knowledge that the client would struggle with the full amount. The client was therefore questioning the discounted remainder of work they had not originally expected us to perform, which did little to improve my mood.

That was the part they could not see. They saw the meeting lasting an hour but not the preparation before it, the thinking afterwards or the half-formed risks discarded before they became advice. They saw the letter sent to the Tax Office but not the abandoned drafts, the legislation checked or the care taken to avoid making an admission that could create a larger problem. They saw the conclusion, not the branches removed before the conclusion became safe enough to present.

In professional work, the shortest answer could carry the longest history. I might tell a client that a proposed arrangement was too risky in a sentence that took less than a minute to deliver, yet behind that sentence sat legislation, rulings, previous cases and practical experience. There was also the mental comparison with several clients who had attempted something similar, including those who had ignored advice and later returned with the evidence of why the advice had been given. The client heard sixty seconds and sometimes valued it accordingly, as though the speed of the answer proved that little effort had been involved rather than demonstrating how much experience had been required to reach it so quickly.

Jon once told me the story of an old plumber called to a factory to identify a problem somewhere in a complicated network of pipes. The plumber walked through the installation, considered what he had seen and provided a quote, only to be sent away because the factory owner thought the amount was far too high. When the problem continued, he was called back, offered essentially the same solution and was sent away for a second time because his price was still considered unreasonable. The problem remained, and no amount of arguing over the quote made the pipes work any better.

By the third visit, urgency had replaced thrift and the factory needed the problem fixed immediately. The plumber quoted four times his original price and was engaged without further argument, because the cost suddenly looked different once the alternative had become visible. He walked around the installation, stopped beside one of the pipes, tapped it twice with a hammer and restored the system to working order. The physical work took only a few seconds, which was unfortunate because speed has always been a dangerous thing to display when someone is waiting to judge the bill.

When the invoice arrived, the owner protested that the charge was outrageous for two taps with a hammer and insisted he could have done that himself. The plumber agreed that he probably could have, then asked the only question that mattered: “Did you know where to hit it?” The hammer taps had taken seconds, but knowing which pipe to strike, where to strike it and how hard had taken a lifetime to learn. The story captured the conundrum facing most professions, because the better the professional became at identifying the problem, the less visible the expertise appeared to the person paying for it.

I recognised myself in that story, although my hammer was usually a sentence, a letter or a recommendation not to proceed. There was always a temptation to give clients the longer answer, not because they needed it, but because length provided visible evidence that something had happened. I could have taken them through every legislative provision, exception, risk and possible variation until their eyes glazed over and the meeting became punishment for both of us. The longer version might have sounded more valuable while leaving them less able to make the decision they had come to discuss.

Instead, I usually translated the thought into language they could use, much as the plumber had reduced decades of experience to two taps of a hammer. I removed the technical structure, slowed the conclusion and gave the client the part that mattered, because there was no value in leaving someone frightened and confused merely so they would appreciate how clever the answer had been. That was another form of dumbing it down, although in this case it was part of the service rather than merely a strategy for surviving the room. The clearer I made the answer, however, the easier it became to mistake it for something simple.

The editing removed much of the evidence of value. A complex explanation sounded expensive even when it was useless, while a simple conclusion sounded obvious even when arriving at it required experience and judgement. The better I became at making the answer understandable, the more likely someone was to wonder why they were paying for it. I had taken the tangled thought, removed what they did not need and handed them something they could use, only to discover that the absence of the tangle made the work appear effortless.

Prevention suffered most from that misunderstanding because success left so little to display. If advice stopped a problem before it occurred, there was no wreckage, penalty, court appearance, tax debt or banking crisis to demonstrate what had been avoided. The client was left with a fee and an absence, and an absence is difficult to value when nothing dramatic happened. It was always possible for the client to decide the disaster had never really been likely, particularly after my advice had helped ensure it did not occur.

Rescue was different because rescue arrived with visible damage. There were letters marked urgent, bank accounts under pressure, creditors demanding answers and spouses asking questions that had been postponed for too long. The problem was immediate, frightening and expensive enough to occupy every conversation. The accountant who could negotiate, explain, reconstruct or create breathing space suddenly had a value the client understood, at least until the breathing space had been created.

People will often pay for someone to clean up the flood more readily than they will pay the person who noticed the tap had been left running. The flood is dramatic and the cleanup can be watched, while mentioning the tap only makes you the irritating bloke who interrupted the party to talk about water. When the carpet is floating down the hallway, however, everyone wants to know why you are not moving faster. Prevention asks people to act while they still have a choice, and that is often the very time they are least interested in hearing from the person who can see where the choice is leading.

I had seen the wall many times before a client reached it. I had raised the cash-flow problem, warned about the tax debt, suggested the drawings were too high or explained that a structure would not protect them from a poor commercial decision. The warning was sometimes heard, occasionally followed and often filed in the part of the mind reserved for information that might become useful after all other options had failed. I could see the wall, but seeing it did not give me the authority to steer someone who had decided the road remained open.

When the collision came, I was expected to help. The earlier advice might have been resisted because it was inconvenient, conservative or unnecessarily negative, yet the same judgement became urgently required once the consequences arrived. I was handed the broken pieces and asked whether they could be put back together before Friday. The urgency belonged to the client, but the responsibility for finding a solution quickly settled across my desk.

There was rarely any acknowledgement that prevention had been offered. The conversation began from the present emergency, with the client explaining what had happened as though both of us had encountered it for the first time. I could have reminded them of every warning, email and meeting, but professional satisfaction was not going to improve their position. I usually swallowed the history, softened the language and began looking for what could still be saved, which was useful to the client and not always useful to me.

Then came the invoice. The client who had urgently needed my judgement discovered, after the urgency passed, that the fee seemed high and the work less substantial than it had appeared during the crisis. They remembered the telephone calls as shorter than they were, the meeting as mostly conversation and the result as less dramatic once the immediate threat had receded. Relief had a surprisingly poor memory, particularly when an account arrived to remind it of the cost.

Some questions were legitimate, and I have no interest in pretending every invoice we issued was beyond challenge. We could make a mistake, explain something badly or fail to make clear that a task sat outside the agreed service. I was not offended by every query, and I did not assume an invoice became sacred merely because our logo appeared at the top. Professional responsibility included being able to justify what we charged and, where we had been wrong, to correct it without turning the discussion into a defence of my character.

There were other occasions when the question was simply a tactic. Dispute the invoice, ask for further detail, suggest the work had been expected, complain that the outcome had not produced enough benefit and allow another month to pass while the matter was being “considered”. The invoice had not been rejected exactly, because an outright refusal might have required a decision and possibly consequences. It had been placed into a soft administrative fog where payment could be delayed without anyone openly saying they had no intention of paying it.

Payment terms stretched gradually, which made each extension seem less significant than it became. Fourteen days turned into thirty, thirty into sixty and sixty into a series of increasingly creative Tuesdays. Clients who would become indignant if their own customers delayed payment treated our invoices as a form of interest-free finance, safe in the knowledge that we were unlikely to switch off the accounting service in the way a supplier might switch off something more immediately noticeable. They understood cash flow perfectly when their money was involved.

Some of the worst debts did not arise from failed businesses. A failure at least provided an explanation, even if it did not provide any money, and there were times when I could see that nothing remained to be collected. The more insulting debts came from clients who continued trading, buying, travelling and paying whichever creditors had enough leverage to become inconvenient. We were left waiting because they assumed the relationship would survive it, and too often they were right.

Relationships before transactions had never meant that transactions did not matter. It meant the relationship shaped how we delivered the service, how honestly we spoke and how much effort we put into understanding the human problem behind the figures. It meant we were prepared to listen longer, explain more carefully, allow for genuine difficulty and sometimes carry a client through a period when a more rigid practice might simply have closed the file. It did not mean the client could convert our goodwill into an unlimited credit facility, or that loyalty flowed only in the direction that suited them.

There were clients who seemed to understand our adherence to the pillars well enough to use it as leverage. They knew we valued the relationship, knew we would hesitate before withdrawing service and knew we would usually make one more call, allow one more extension or accept one more promise of payment next week. “Relationship” became a word brought out whenever they wanted patience, indulgence or another exception, but it rarely appeared when the obligation was theirs. They expected us to behave according to our principles while treating those same principles as negotiable when payment fell due.

That was the distortion I had not anticipated. We had intended the pillars to describe mutual trust, but some clients treated them as evidence that we could be pushed further than others. Our willingness to care was interpreted as an inability to draw a line, and our reluctance to damage a long-standing relationship became the very reason some people believed they could delay, question or avoid payment without consequence. The relationship mattered deeply when they needed help but became strangely less important when the transaction required them to honour their part of it.

The weakness did not sit in the pillars themselves so much as in the expectation I attached to them. They described how we intended to behave, but I had quietly assumed our behaviour would influence the people dealing with us. We would offer advice rather than merely process forms, so surely the advice would be valued, and we would place relationships ahead of transactions, so surely the relationship would not be used against us. Logic should have told me that one person’s values do not automatically become a shared contract, yet emotionally I continued to act as though fairness would reproduce itself if practised consistently enough.

Courage before convenience meant we would say what needed to be said even when the client did not want to hear it. Stewardship before extraction meant we would not treat every interaction as an opportunity to increase a fee, and there were many occasions when we did more than we charged because doing less would have left the client exposed. Those principles placed obligations on us, but I had not properly considered what happened when the other party enjoyed the benefit without accepting any corresponding responsibility. We had built standards for our own conduct and then become disappointed when others treated them as a one-sided service agreement.

Perhaps that was naïve, although I do not use the word to excuse every poor decision I made about debtors. Business did not become fair merely because we had behaved fairly, and a client did not adopt our values simply because we had placed them in a brochure or repeated them at a meeting. I understood that intellectually, but some part of me continued expecting a basic reciprocity because anything else seemed too bleak a basis on which to work. We did good work, kept our promises and tried not to leave people worse off, so I continued wondering why they would not pay us without being chased.

The debtor calls challenged more than cash flow. Each promise of “next week” carried a small message that our need could wait, no matter how politely the words were delivered. The wages of our staff, the commitments of our practice and the value of the work already provided were less urgent than whatever else the client had decided to fund. We had become the creditor expected to understand, largely because understanding was one of the things they had always relied upon us to provide.

That expectation reached somewhere deeper than the invoice. The client thought they were questioning a figure, but I often heard a question about whether the thought, judgement and responsibility behind it had been worth anything. They saw an amount on a page, perhaps beside a brief description that could never capture the weight of the work. I saw the years required to know what to do when their problem arrived and the responsibility I had accepted when I gave the answer.

I knew I should not take it personally. An unpaid invoice is a commercial issue, and every business adviser will tell you to establish systems, enforce terms, collect deposits and separate emotion from debt recovery. I had given versions of that advice myself, because it was correct and because accountants are expected to be especially sensible about money. It was also much easier to deliver when the invoice did not contain a piece of your own mind.

Professional service is personal, however much we pretend otherwise. The work comes from your judgement, your reputation and your willingness to accept responsibility for the answer, so an unpaid invoice never felt to me like a number had merely remained outstanding. It felt as though something I had given had been accepted, used and then quietly declared unworthy of being paid for. Each one cut deeper than I was prepared to admit, because the challenge was not only to the fee but to the value of the thought, experience and responsibility behind it.

The wound did not remain neatly inside the accounts receivable ledger. It followed me out of the office, sat beside me in the car and came home long after the report had been closed, even when I said very little about it. I could tell myself that the client’s behaviour reflected their circumstances, priorities or character rather than my worth, and logically that was often true. Emotion has never shown much respect for correct accounting treatment, however, and the unpaid amount continued to sit somewhere inside me as evidence that what I had provided had not mattered enough.

I could become sarcastic, although much of the sarcasm remained internal. I wondered whether I should send two invoices, one for the work and another for the privilege of financing it, perhaps with generous terms for both. I considered adding a box clients could tick to select the excuse they intended to use: administrative oversight, payment expected Friday, authorised person unavailable, invoice not received or mysterious dissatisfaction discovered after ninety days. The list grew over time, because clients showed far more creativity explaining non-payment than some had ever shown running their businesses.

The humour gave the hurt somewhere to hide, which was often its most useful purpose. It allowed me to sound irritated rather than wounded, because irritation was easier to display than the feeling of having been cut to the bone. Staff could laugh about the usual promises, predict which clients would pay only after a second statement and recognise the ones who needed a telephone call because paper had no effect on them. I laughed with them, made the expected remarks and carried on with the next job, while the report continued to present the same uncomfortable evidence beneath the jokes.

Every unpaid invoice left a small wound in the belief that the work mattered and that people would act fairly once they had received its benefit. Some wounds closed when payment eventually arrived, although even then the scar remained because the chasing had already said something about the relationship. Others were left open long enough for resentment, self-doubt and humiliation to settle into them. The Black Dog did not need to create the wound; it only needed to watch it fester and remind me of it when everything else had gone quiet.

We were carrying other people’s businesses while some of them declined to carry their part of ours. We were expected to anticipate their problems, remember their deadlines and find time when something became urgent, even when the urgency had been created by months of inaction. They could forget our invoice because forgetting it did not immediately damage them, whereas forgetting their lodgement or failing to answer their bank could produce consequences they expected us to help manage. The damage to us was quieter and therefore easier for everyone else to ignore.

That quiet damage suited the Black Dog. It did not need one catastrophic event when it could feed on small erosions of worth, each too ordinary to justify the way it accumulated. A disputed invoice, another broken payment promise and another client suggesting that work outside the agreed service should somehow have been included were not enough individually to explain a descent. Together, they became part of the dull roar behind the functioning professional, another reason to feel used while continuing to appear useful.

From outside, nothing had changed. The calls were made, the staff were paid and the work continued, because competence has always been good at covering what it costs to remain competent. I remained the person who could solve the problem, explain the figures and absorb the client’s anxiety without appearing to carry any of my own. The better I performed that role, the less likely anyone was to see what the role was taking out of me.

The debtors report returned every month with the reliability missing from some of the payments it recorded. Names moved between columns, some disappeared after payment and others settled into the over-ninety-day section as though they had taken a long lease. I kept making the calls because not making them would have allowed the problem to grow, and because there were wages and obligations that could not be met by principle alone. Each call required me to reduce the anger, soften the words and present a reasonable version of a thought that was becoming less reasonable inside my head.

I wanted to say that we had done what we promised and had often done more than we promised when the client needed it. I wanted to say the service had been delivered, the advice had been available and the rescue had been performed when the warning was ignored. I wanted to ask why their obligations to us became negotiable when ours to them never had been. None of those questions was likely to collect the account, so they remained in my head while I chose the language the room could tolerate.

Instead, I asked when we could expect payment and listened to another answer involving Friday or next week. I wrote a note in the system to record a promise neither of us entirely believed, then moved to the next name and repeated the performance. The outward version of me remained patient, professional and understanding because that was the version most likely to produce a result. Another part of me kept bouncing its head against the wall, not because I could not understand the explanation but because I understood it too well.

The Flat Rate Calculator had taught us to recognise faffing time, interruption and the cost of work being stopped and restarted. It had helped us place a price around the production of accounts and returns, and it had shown us where time disappeared even when no obvious work product emerged. What it could never calculate was the cost of repeatedly having your judgement used, your responsibility relied upon and your value questioned after the danger had passed. There was no line in the spreadsheet for the part of the professional that went home diminished.

There was no allowance for the anger carried home, the humiliation of chasing money already earned or the internal editing required to remain courteous with somebody treating payment as optional. The calculator could measure staff hours and overheads, but it could not measure the amount of self that had been put into a difficult answer or the damage done when that answer was later devalued. The spreadsheet could price the work, yet it could not tell me what being unpaid was taking out of the person doing it. Numbers were where the evidence landed, but they were rarely the whole story.

That morning, after the final call, I closed the report without feeling that anything had been resolved. A few promises had been made, one client had agreed to pay immediately and several others had pushed us into another version of next week. The total remained on the screen until it disappeared behind the next piece of work demanding attention, which was how most professional hurt was managed in the practice. There was always another return, another deadline or another client problem available to cover it.

The four pillars were still standing, although each unpaid invoice seemed to test what they rested upon. We would continue giving advice before compliance, valuing relationships, speaking with courage and acting as stewards rather than extractors because those principles belonged to Robyn and me before they belonged to the practice. I still believed in them, which may have been both the strength and the weakness, because belief made it difficult to become as hard as the debtors system sometimes required. Every unpaid account felt like a small kick at the foundation, yet abandoning the pillars would have cost something I valued more than the money.

The client probably thought they had delayed a bill, questioned a charge or gained another few weeks of breathing space. What they had also done, without knowing or perhaps caring, was question whether the years of thought behind that bill retained any value once the immediate need had passed. The money mattered because the practice had obligations, but the message travelled further and settled somewhere far less tidy than the ledger. By then I had learned that professional value could be urgent, relied upon and almost invisible at the same time.

It became more sustenance for the Black Dog, another quiet erosion of inner worth hidden behind the debtor ledger and the ordinary work of the day. I would answer the next call, solve the next problem and continue behaving according to the pillars because that was what I had trained myself to do and what Robyn and I still believed was right. Somewhere underneath, though, the question remained unpaid as well, returning each time the report appeared on the screen. If the work mattered so much when they needed it, why did its value disappear the moment the invoice arrived?