In most organisations it is not unusual to find that middle management create reports to present to upper management. These reports range from financial to performance, sales to marketing and so on.

Most of these reports are presented as either sexy looking dashboard reports or in the dreaded PowerPoint presentation.

However this does cause a hidden danger for the business and to see this danger you have to think about what motivates the middle manager.

Are they more interested in the health of the business or self-preservation and making themselves look good in the eyes of the upper manage. These aims are often closely related, but on top of the middle managers agenda will be feeding their family and paying their mortgage.

As result of self-reporting, middle managers like David Brent (Michael Scott to my American visitors) from the Office are presented with an ideal opportunity of sexing up their reports in their favour. For instance a quick tweak of a charts axis will make all those important lines move up the chart. Alternatively they can chose to interpret the raw data differently or chose to ignore sections of data all together.

This affects businesses of all sizes and can cost companies millions of pounds a year, especially if those reports are in turn used to produce end of year reports or financial reports.

So how does a business stop this from happening.

The only true way is to stop managers reporting on their own departments. Reporting should be done by a different department at the very least. Letting people report on their own departments is like asking your boss for a rise and only allowing him to base his decision on information that you put together.

So a couple of days later I popped in to the Cardiff branch of Santander only to be advised that I needed to post in a copy of my passport and my utility bills to their customer services department. They also went on to say a change of address couldn’t be done over the counter.

After posting the copies in, nothing happened for a couple of weeks, no confirmation letters, phone calls or emails. I checked the letter tracking system on the Royal Mail site and it confirmed that my details had reached them the day after I had posted them. So why the hold up?

Another quick phone call to Santander revealed that they had ignored my letter because they were not original documents enclosed. I informed them that there was no way I was sending them my original Passport in the post as they had lost several documents of mine in the past (hence me sending everything to them via registered post). They said that is no problem, pop in to my nearest branch with the original documents and they will do things over the counter. I explained I had already done that and had been refused only to be told that the branch was wrong and that I should try again.

To cut a long story short I went through that loop 3 times before it came to a head one sunny morning in the Pontypridd branch of Santander.

Once again they were refusing to accept my documents as it was something that wasn’t handled in branch. So whilst at the counter I phoned up Santanders “customer service” department and told them the situation. By which point the manager was now out to see what the fuss was about.

As a result I was standing in front of the branch manager who continued to say she couldn’t do anything whilst on the phone to their customer services team who was telling me they could. So I asked the manager to speak to the customer service guy on the phone but he refused because it could have been anyone on the phone. Fair enough, so I asked the customer service person to phone the manager on a Santander only line which he did.

Now we are in a 3 way Mexican stand-off in the middle of the Pontypridd branch of Santander. It was only resolved when the customer service guy called in the area manager to tell the manger what to do.

So what have we learnt from the Santander loop?

There are three lessons here.

(1)    The processes were not wrong and anyone of them in isolation could be made to work, however there was no consistency between the various departments leaving their customers (me) stuck in the middle of an impossible situation.

(2)    There processes are built with zero flexibility in mind. Just because I wanted to do this over the counter it threw their entire system out.

(3)    No one at Santander is either allowed to take responsibility of an issue or wants to take responsibility

Was this a one off? No, I’m now trying to increase my monthly payments on a personal loan I have with them so I can pay it off quicker. 3 months in and I’m still nowhere nearer to rescheduling my payments because I’m stuck in a new Santander loop.

All of this happened around about the time I was looking for a new home for my business account and I was almost ready to move it to Santander. Luckily for me I got to witness this issues and moved my bank account elsewhere.

We think we have found the answer in the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) which is tool used to create many of the top games on the PC, X-Box 360, Playstation 3, iPhone and iPad. With over 30 years gaming under my belt, I have no idea why I haven’t thought of this before.

Over the next couple of months we will be conducting a series of experiments to see how feasible the idea is and what benefits it will offer the end users.

Key benefits we have already identified include;

1. Fully news channel style animated 3D graphics
2. Seamless animation between slides even when viewed out of order
3. Interactive elements allow you to conduct “What if” scenarios without leaving the presentation
4. Totally bespoke user interfaces and menus
5. Presentations can be distributed to iPhones and iPhones retaining all of the above functionality

At this stage everything is purely experimental and we will be posting regular updates here.

Now I consider myself to be a flexible kind of a person and I always go the extra mile for my clients, but there does come a time when enough is enough.

On a public forum like this I’m not going to share with you who got the bullet but I will run through reasons why I called an end to our relationship earlier today.

Constant Late Payments

The jobs I take on for this client are what I consider to be small jobs, normally a day or two’s work at the max, but they are fairly frequent. Our terms are a 50% deposit with the order with the remaining 50% due on completion. The deposits with the client were never a problem and I would be paid within a matter of hours, however when it came to paying the balance there was always a series of excuses – “I have to wait for accounts to process your order”, “I have to wait for the financial director to sign the cheques” etc etc. It was not unusual for me to spend as much time chasing up payments as I did working on the job in the first place. As a result all his quotes were loaded to recoup some of this wasted time.

Specification Creep

When I would start chasing for payment another regular ploy was to ask me to add features here and there – in return he would speed up my payment. Effectively holding my final payment hostage in return for extra features. The stupid thing about this ploy is that we offer a free 90 day tweaking period anyway, where we do minor changes for free for the first 90 days of the spreadsheets life. So why try to hold my payment hostage?

Broken Promises

I received lots of promises to introduce new clients and future big projects in return for discounted prices. Now, I know this is probably the norm for most buyers in UK and around the World, but with this guy it was almost every other sentence that came out of his mouth and in the two years I have dealt with him, not one has happened. Other buyers try this tactic once or twice to get a discounted price but never every time.

Bullying

This is the first time I have ever experienced this. I quoted them a price for a doing a job and pointed out that I wouldn’t be able to start for two months due to my current workload. They paid their 50% deposit in to my bank account and started to demand that I start work immediately on the grounds that I had accepted their deposit. I pointed out that we operate a strict first come first served policy and there was no queue jumping.

Bribery

When the bullying technique didn’t work they switched to bribery, offering to double my fee if I dropped one of my other clients so they could go to the front of the queue.

So today I have refunded their deposit and put them in touch with other companies and really hope to never hear from them again. It was a horrible thing to have to do, but one of the reasons I became self employed was so I wouldn’t have to put up with this kind of behaviour. Apart from the bullying and bribery I could put up with any of the above in isolation and I’m fairly well set up to cope with any of them, but bullying and bribery are bridges I cant cross.

My business is an honest business and I treat clients and suppliers in the way I want to be treated myself. I expect them to treat me in the same way and I don’t think it is too much to ask.

Have you ever fired a client? If so why and how did you do it?

So why the switch, why now and why is it so important?

Since the very start of the Excel-Expert website I have been planning to include a heap of tutorials, tips, tricks and guides on the site. So I have experimented with different platforms and even created a bespoke platform of my own, however non of them were flexible enough to do what I needed.

I have experimented with WordPress in the past but up until now I haven’t been able to find the right combination of hosting packages and WordPress plugins.

What can you expect to see in the new blog section?

The blog section will contain anything and everything of importance to me, after all it is my blog. This of course means you will see a lot of stuff on Excel, programming, technology and business. You will also see a lot of stuff that is more personal to me such as gaming (I’ve been a video gamer for over 30 years), charity work, family life and all other stuff life chucks at me.

I’m also hoping to convince a few of you to contribute guest blogs on any subject you see fit.