I have a friend who is a speech therapist. She works with children, and for years she would think, Gee, I wish there were software that could help me do this. I wish I could track things. I wish there were a better way to keep all of this together.
And then, lo and behold, somebody built it.
She raved about this software to me. But what struck me wasn’t really the software itself. It was what she kept saying about the person who created it.
Somebody Really Thought This Through
Somebody understood what she actually does all day. Somebody understood the little steps, the things that are hard to keep track of, the information she needs later, the things that fall through the cracks. Somebody knew the work well enough to build something around the work instead of forcing the work around the software.
And she was so grateful for that. She stressed this over and over again.
“I’m so grateful this person built it.”
I keep thinking about that conversation.
We Don't Have to Begin From Zero
Seneca wrote about how, through the work and thinking of those who came before us, we can “annex every age” to our own. We don’t have to begin from zero. We inherit centuries of people thinking, solving problems, writing things down, and leaving something behind for the next person.
Accounting is actually a remarkable example of this.
In 1494, Luca Pacioli published the first printed detailed description of double-entry bookkeeping. He didn’t invent double-entry accounting; he documented and organized a system already being used by merchants. He later became a close friend and collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci. More than five hundred years later, we are still using the fundamental logic he wrote down: debits, credits, ledgers, balances.
That is extraordinary to me.
I could only hope to be compared to the brilliant mathematician Luca Pacioli.
Decades of Doing the Work
Seneca wrote about how, through the work and thinking of those who came before us, we can “annex every age” to our own. We don’t have to begin from zero. We inherit centuries of people thinking, solving problems, writing things down, and leaving something behind for the next person.
Accounting is actually a remarkable example of this.
In 1494, Luca Pacioli published the first printed detailed description of double-entry bookkeeping. He didn’t invent double-entry accounting; he documented and organized a system already being used by merchants. He later became a close friend and collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci. More than five hundred years later, we are still using the fundamental logic he wrote down: debits, credits, ledgers, balances.
That is extraordinary to me.
I could only hope to be compared to the brilliant mathematician Luca Pacioli.
And over all those years, there were thousands of little moments of thinking:
- Why can't the system just do this?
- Why isn't this connected to that?
- Why can't the project manager see this without having to ask accounting?
- Why are we entering the same information three times?
- Why does this have to be so hard?
A-TaV Is Decades of Those Questions
It is decades of working inside nonprofit finance and compliance; and slowly thinking through what a useful tool would actually look like if it were designed around the people doing the work.
And someday, what I want more than anything is for somebody to use A-TaV and say what my friend said about her software:
I am so glad somebody thought of this.
Building Around the People Doing the Work
I want them to feel that somebody cared enough to understand how hard their work is. That somebody thought through the steps. That somebody understood the grant, the budget, the contract, the accounting, the approval, the reporting; and understood that they are not separate things. They are all parts of the same work.
Maybe that is what it means, in our own small way, to annex every age into our own.
We take what generations before us figured out. We add what decades of our own experience have taught us. And then we build something that makes the work a little easier for the person who comes next.
That Is Where Our Heart Is
That is where our heart is in A-TaV. That is why we were so so passionate about building it, and why we are so passionate about refining it.
