Notes
Notes
Short takes on the news affecting small UK firms, and deeper research into what software and automation actually cost — free to read, never gated.
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The fit tax: what off-the-shelf software that almost works really costs
The case against off-the-shelf software is often argued with numbers that fall apart when you trace them — a 2002 slide about four in-house apps, a decade-old study of desktop licences at 30,000-seat firms, a hosting company's worked example. Strip the junk out and the honest picture for a small UK firm is narrower but real: off-the-shelf wins for standard jobs, sprawl is mostly an enterprise disease, and the cost of software that only almost fits is paid in workaround labour and a fit gap nobody measures at your size. So the only figure worth having is the one you count yourself.
18 min read
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Don't marry your business to one AI model
The worst environment for a business isn't strict AI regulation, or none — it's unpredictable regulation. The US is regulating frontier AI through discretionary national-security intervention (models pulled with little notice) while refusing a formal regulator; markets can price clear rules but not uncertainty, and the primary evidence (Bloom 2009; Baker-Bloom-Davis 2016; Brexit's ~11% UK investment hit) shows uncertainty alone suppresses investment. For an SME the hedge isn't picking the 'right' model but building an orchestration layer so switching models is a configuration change, not a rebuild — which also cuts cost by routing each task to the cheapest adequate model.
7 min read
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What chasing late payments actually costs a UK small business
Late payment is treated as a discipline problem you solve with willpower — chase harder, be firmer. The UK government's own 2025 numbers say the biggest costs are the labour of chasing and the businesses that close waiting; the financing cost of the delay is real but smaller. And the thing that removes the chasing labour isn't more discipline — it's software that does the chasing for you.
12 min read
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What re-keying actually costs a UK small business (and why nobody can tell you)
Bad productivity statistics have taught business owners to ignore real productivity problems. Re-keying is a perfect example: the famous numbers are mostly real figures with the labels torn off, while the trustworthy answer is the one a business measures for itself — timed, costed, and priced the way HMRC prices admin time.
25 min read