On this day in AD 399, Socrates the Greek Philosopher was sentenced to death by an Athenian court for reasons that to date are still unclear. Socrates was famous for his questioning approach to life and a perpetual undermining of normal assumptions through the asking of difficult questions.
One memorable sound-bite, from a philosophical life only recorded in writing by his disciples, is “virtue is knowledge”. By this Socrates meant that if one knows the good, one will always do the good. He, of course, said much more that this and we could run with an examination of what is ‘virtue’ and what he meant by ‘knowledge’ for some while, but that is not what I am driving at today.
Let’s just paraphrase for now and say that if one always knows what is good for one’s business one will always do what is good for one’s business. The big problem of course (as it is with virtue so often) is really knowing what is good for the business. Often accountancy figures are not good enough and we have to fall back on performance ratios to examine how well we are doing. Just having money in the bank may not be good enough in some instances: we always have to ask the question should there have been more money in the bank if we had done something differently over the last year, quarter, month or whatever.
Yes, we may make this examination by using accountancy figures, but they will always be after the fact. Yes we can correct for the coming period, but at that point opportunity has gone.
ProQuin does not take this backward approach, it is always forward looking. Through the Job Costing/Quotation dialogue we can critically appraise every component of a quote or job before we commit to a price to the customer. Our cost assumptions are challenged at every point and we can decide during the quotation process how much cash will be generated for the business by each item or service.
Is ProQuin Socratic software? Well I think I might leave that one to a philosopher to answer. What ProQuin does do is allow the small business owner to ‘know’ the right thing to do at the right time and therefor make it easier to continually do the right thing for the business and in that respect then virtue really is knowledge.
Find out more about ProQuin at http://www.proquin.co.uk
