Will The Balancing Act bookkeeping self-study induction course offer a positive ‘Return on Investment’?

This blog is about the costs and benefits of The Balancing Act bookkeeping self-study induction course. It is a blended programme of on-line interactive presentations and learning materials and a hard copy workbook that allows one to apply that learning to a case study that takes one from the books of prime entry to a Balance Sheet and Profit & Loss Account. For more information on the programme itself, please click here.

The cost of The Balancing Act course is £250 plus VAT

You are accountants, so you are going to ask “£250? Can you not offer it cheaper?”  However, you may also be a business owner or manager and with that role in mind you may also ask whether in fact this is a good investment. An investment is cheap if it offers a good return and expensive if it doesn’t, after all.

Although I hate calling anything “cheap”, this is cheap! I suppose it would sound nicer if I said it is extremely good value and it should provide a many-fold return on your investment.
However – it is cheap!

Here are the numbers:

The Costs:

The Benefits:

1) Increased productivity of new staff over their first couple of months because of this training, for example:

2) Reduced time spent by line managers /mentor providing this bookkeeping induction training themselves, for example:

The Savings:

The Balancing Act offers a 1,320% ROI

£3,300 – £250 = £3,050 or £3,300 / £250 = 1,320%

Being an accountant, if we took the lost chargeable time of the first week as a cost, rather than a reduction in the benefit, the numbers would be (£3,300 + £687.50) / (£250 + 687.50) = 425% return. Either way, there is a still a £3,050 saving!

Can you afford not to use such an efficient training method?

The above numbers are very rough and ready, and we could argue about the detail. However, one can see that it does not take much of an increase in student productivity and time-saving of the line manager to provide a saving in reduced lost chargeable time that is considerably more than the cost of the course.

Reduce time wasted on unsuitable trainees

What we have not included in the above, is the cost saving of identifying in the first week or two that your new recruit does not have the aptitude to become an accountant, allowing you to “release” them at that stage, rather than struggling on for several weeks or months. These costs are the cost of their under-recoveries in that period and the cost of the time of their line manager / mentor spent training them to no avail.

Help people find the right career path

Also, in these instances, the line managers get really frustrated and the new recruit leaves at Christmas completely demoralised and their self-confidence severely dented. If they leave after one or two weeks, they will have time to find another job / career and the time will hardly be noticed on their CV. If questioned, not many people will blame them if they say ‘I wasn’t cut out to be an accountant’

The Balancing Act is fast

The course costs £250 and can be completed within a 5-day week (if the student works really hard!).
Attending an on-site bookkeeping course will normally cost more than £250 per day.

The key thing with the course, like any training, is that you have to make it clear to the trainee that you take this very seriously and you are not providing the course as a gesture of goodwill. You expect them to take it seriously and you will expect to see the impact of their learning in their performance in the office – albeit accepting that it will still take them time to build up to full productivity.

Like any training cost, this is an investment – and our clients buy it for their new recruits because they obtain a return on that investment, and their managers save a lot of time in explaining to new recruits Double Entry, which the recruit thinks is Double Dutch!