Manual bookkeeping and inefficient tax and tax system still complicate the functioning of small and medium-sized companies – interview for Trend

As we provide accounting services within the Highgate group mainly to smaller entrepreneurs, Peter Varga outlined in an interview for the weekly Trend several current problems that still significantly distort the business environment in Slovakia. One of them is manual accounting, which makes it disproportionately expensive.

Even though 2021 is coming, we still see some accountants manually uploading some data into accounting software, despite the existence of ways to import this data into the accounting software in a structured way. Highgate Group is an accounting company that will never develop its own accounting or extraction software. Not only is this not within our power, it is not within our remit either. Our role in accounting is to be an advisor and analyst if needed, but often times we mainly “clean up the mess” if someone has a peek into the company (e.g. a bank, investor, buyer) or the client has wilder business and/or habits.

Our role is also to advise clients on asset protection, tax and levy optimization, contract setup, representation before investors, invoicing to own company, etc. (for a list of some of the topics we cover, please visit our education platform). We want to be our client’s full-service legal, tax, levy and accounting advisor. It is therefore not our role to develop technical solutions.

And that’s the way it should be.

And if we want our clients not to pay a disproportionate amount for accounting in relation to their revenues, it is also our task to act as a consultant who knows the various standard technical solutions and can find the ideal solution for a particular client in their tangle. In this context, it should be taken into account that for most smaller companies, bookkeeping is only a necessary legal obligation without added value. The ultimate goal is that the client does not pay for manual bookkeeping. That is why, especially for e-commerce, we can provide significantly lower prices for bookkeeping than the market standard.