The Map Is Not the Territory

Your books are not your business

Imagine a society where business as we understand it doesn’t exist.

A Merchant in this society is doing so well that he wants to expand, but he doesn’t have the money to do that. So he asks his Wealthy Friend to give him the money, to be paid back with interest.

The Wealthy Friend says: “Well, how will you spend the money?”

The Merchant tells him how he’ll spend it, and the Wealthy Friend agrees—that sounds great!—and so the loan is made.

But the Wealthy Friend also decides to check in on the Merchant every afternoon, showing up at his shop to make sure things are going as described.

Business being chaotic as it is, the Wealthy Friend gets suddenly nervous when things are not going exactly as they planned, and doesn’t quite understand why. So he starts telling the Merchant how to run his shop, and refuses to give him any more money if the Merchant rejects his ideas.

But the Wealthy Friend has bad ideas, and the Merchant knows they are BAD ideas.

However, the Merchant has no choice. He must partially follow the bad ideas, because he needs the money from his friend.

Now, a smarter ‘Wealthy Friend’ in the same scenario would realize after a few visits to the shop that his ideas will harm the Merchant’s business, and that his presence is not helping.

This Smart Wealthy Friend proposes a method of tracking the shop’s money in a way that makes sense to both him (as the lender) and the Merchant, while allowing the lender to stay out of the Merchant’s way.

So they check in on things a lot less frequently. But, the Merchant has a new secondary job: tracking the business in the way that he and his Smart Wealthy Friend have agreed.

This secondary job is a pretty complex one, and here’s why: the Merchant must translate his actual business into a representation of that business for the Smart Wealthy Friend, who doesn’t know how the actual business is actually working.

What results is a sort of map of the business—one that the Smart Wealthy Friend can refer to for directions, even though he will never visit the actual business which the map represents.

That is bookkeeping.

Make the map well, and you get access to Other People’s Money, while keeping their bad ideas far, far away.

Everything Every Week handles bookkeeping for sole proprietorships that are single-owner and have no employees. We give you everything you need and nothing you don’t, and tell you what to do with your money, every week.

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