The clocks have gone back and my slippers have come out – it finally feels like cosy season is upon us.
For my kids, October is all about Halloween, and we're busy decorating the house for our annual spooky soirée. At work, October's been just as thrilling. I've gone from the foot of the Tian Shan mountains to the Terrace of the House of Commons, with a quick stop on stage at DAS in between. Very different locations, but such similar themes.
I had the great pleasure of opening the IX Eurasian Forum of Accountants and Auditors in Almaty, hosted by our ICFM colleagues in Kazakhstan, and of spending time with the National Bank of Kazakhstan while I was there.
In Kazakhstan, the government creates the technology and the private sector follows. Business plugs into the digital public infrastructure.
Over here it seems to be the other way round. With Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, government set the rules and then stepped back to let the private sector build the software. It's been a long process… and the end result is that commercial software is now the only way for a sole trader to comply.
And of course the next big change is already on its way. From April 2029 every VAT invoice between businesses will need to be a structured e-invoice, sent through commercial software. HMRC's detailed plan is expected around the Budget this week, so I'll be watching closely.
If a business already uses something like Xero or Sage, e-invoicing should just arrive as an update with no new system to learn, no government portal to log into. But when plenty of small businesses still invoice from Word or on paper, for them, ‘the market will build it’ ultimately means ‘you’ll have to buy it’. It's faster for the digitally confident majority and slower for everyone else, which is why the human support in between matters so much. That’s where bookkeepers come in!
The same question everywhere
During my trip it became clear to me that an auditor in a state enterprise in Kazakhstan is asking many of the same questions as a bookkeeper at their kitchen table in Kettering. How do we handle all this change? And how do we keep adding value when it feels like technology is so powerful it could one day do all our work for us?
I think the answer for bookkeepers is to get closer to the bit of the work that really fires you up. Making a difference to a business – taking away some of the stress and chaos, helping owners understand what their numbers mean and use that understanding to make better decisions. The bank rec is just one of the ways to get there. If technology keeps speeding that up, brilliant.
Who holds the purse strings
Technology isn't something that just happens to us, though. It's built, funded and steered by people. That's why, at the Digital Accountancy Show, I put up a slide that turned out to be the one thing people wanted to talk to me about afterwards. The faces we associate with AI are almost all men – Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang. My slide showed who actually holds the purse strings. Sarah Friar at OpenAI. Anat Ashkenazi at Alphabet. Amy Hood at Microsoft. Susan Li at Meta. Colette Kress at Nvidia. There are female CFOs at some of the most powerful AI companies in the world.
We live in a time when men and women from all walks of life can do anything. ICB's membership is 78% female – not because women make better bookkeepers, but because when you make exams accessible, you reach more people who can't get out to an exam centre. It's the same reason we can support people with disabilities and neurodivergence. Open the door a little wider and you'd be amazed who walks through it.
Opening doors was the theme in Parliament too. Mid-month I joined Small Business Britain and Xero for the Maple Project reception on the House of Commons Terrace, celebrating progress on the Maple Review. The review talks about supporting people from disadvantaged backgrounds to start and grow a business, and one figure really stayed with me – around 45% of single-parent households in the UK live in poverty, and about nine in ten of them are headed by women. A flexible business you can fit around the school run could make a real difference there… and bookkeeping is exactly that kind of business.
It was lovely to see Michelle Ovens CBE and Kate Hayward, Xero's UK MD, and to hear how Xero is powering the Maple Project and championing financial education all the way from the classroom to starting a business.
ICB supports the call for a Business Skills Guarantee and for financial literacy to be taught in schools. But skills don't only come from courses. Every single day ICB bookkeepers help business owners understand their own numbers in a way that's accessible rather than intimidating. The review talks about wrap-around support for new founders…well, it already exists. It's called a bookkeeper.
I was also lucky enough to visit the House of Lords for lunch with HRH Prince Michael of Kent, ICB's founding patron. He's a Russian speaker, and we talked about how much I'd have loved to speak the language in Kazakhstan, where Russian is still an official language. My practised hellos and thank yous only got me so far.
Back at ICB, October was full of brilliant people. Our Advisory Council met for some wonderful discussions – they're real titans of industry, and several of them have now successfully exited the fantastic bookkeeping businesses they built. If you've ever wondered whether a bookkeeping practice is something you can sell one day, there's your answer.
Ross Grange, ICB's Learning Partnerships Manager, and I also hosted a New Student Webinar. It makes me so proud to talk directly to students about how to fit our online exams around a busy schedule. It's hard enough learning something new and taking exams, so I hope ICB can take just a little pressure off our next generation of bookkeepers. I also enjoyed running a webinar on scaling a practice with Pinnacle, one of our Approved Employers in India. You can meet them at the summit, so do come and say hello.
And that's what excites me about my job. Running a business is joyous, and it'sbloody hard. Everyone who does it needs someone in their corner who loves the numbers so they don't have to. My husband calls this their ‘bread head’.That's exactly what our members are; in Kettering, Kazakhstan and around the world.
The rules and the tools will keep changing. What doesn't change is why our work matters.