Sense with Cents

A short note on what to expect from this blog going forward, because the tone of a recent post may have read as a change in direction. It is not a change in what I see. It is a change in what I say about it.

Forty years in this industry teaches you to spot certain patterns. Software vendors that quietly tilt the playing field. Professionals who steer customers in directions that benefit the professional more than the customer. Products that get recommended for reasons that are not on the marketing page. Bookkeeping advice that does not survive a second opinion. None of this is new. None of it is hidden, if you know where to look.

For most of those forty years, my approach has been to fix what I could fix inside my own software, answer the customer questions that came in, and leave the broader patterns alone. The customer in front of me got my full attention. The structural stuff — the partner programs, the misleading recommendations, the silence around incentives — I noted, filed, and kept to myself. That worked while it worked.

It does not work anymore. Customers are getting steered with more confidence and less disclosure than they used to be. The professionals doing the steering are not always wrong, but they are not always right either, and the customer has no way to tell the difference when one side of the conversation is being held back. A customer who walks away from good software because of a misinformed or incentivized recommendation is a customer who has been failed by people who knew better. I have watched that happen too many times to keep treating it as someone else's problem.

So when I see a problem, I will name it. When I see a conflict of interest, I will describe it. When a customer brings me a recommendation that does not hold up, and the reason it does not hold up is structural rather than incidental, I will write about the structure. The recent post on accountants and payroll software referrals is what that looks like in practice. There will be more of them. Not a campaign, not a target list — just what comes up, when it comes up, and what I think is worth saying about it.

What this is not. It is not a shift to grievance posting. The point is never to complain about a peer, a competitor, or a profession. The point is to give the small business owner enough information to make a real decision. If a vendor or a professional is operating in a way that affects that decision, the customer is entitled to know. If they are not, there is nothing to write about. Most of the people working in this industry are honest and competent. The ones who are not deserve to be named only when naming them helps a reader avoid a bad outcome.

What this also means. The same transparency I am asking of others applies to Medlin and to me. We have always told customers about the four items we receive a small commission on, and the alternatives they can use instead. We have always told customers about the free options where they exist, including the ones that compete with services we sell. None of that changes. If anything, it tightens. A blog that names other people's incentives needs to be unambiguous about its own. No secrets in the past, no secrets in the present, no secrets in the future — that is how Medlin has operated for forty years, and it is how I intend to keep writing here.

The principle underneath all of this is the one I have always tried to work from. The relationship between a small business owner and the people they pay for advice works when the incentives are visible. When they are not, the customer is making decisions with part of the picture missing. Pointing that out, on either side of the counter, is the most useful thing I know how to do with this blog.

That is the whole note. Back to regular posts.

See also: Is Your Accountant Recommending Software — or Selling It? and Help Me Help You.

This post was lightly cleaned up with AI for grammar and flow. The opinions, the operator experience, and the company practices described are mine and Medlin's.