BusinessSafe — one record of how your business actually runs

Every small business keeps most of its important information in one person's head. Where the accounts are. Who to call when the system goes down. Which client would leave if a particular staff member did. What the owner would want done if they were suddenly not there.

That works, right up until it doesn't. BusinessSafe writes it down — in a form that is useful on an ordinary Tuesday, not just on the worst day.

Two things it measures

Most of what goes in is a record. Two parts are a diagnosis, and they are the reason people keep opening it.

How much of the business is you

63% owner dependency

Score your own involvement in each part of the business and it tells you what proportion still runs through you. It falls as you hand work over, and it is the single biggest factor in what the business is worth to a buyer.

What you are quietly paying

$263 a month, unwatched

Every subscription with its cost, totalled and tracked. Most owners find money in the first sitting — software nobody cancelled, still billing two years later.

What goes in it

The first few phone calls, in order, and why each person is on the list.
How the business runs — its parts, who works in each, and what breaks without them.
Where documents, accounts and keys are kept. Never the passwords themselves.
What should happen to the business: sold, kept running, wound down, or handed to someone already inside.
The chains nobody writes down: which account the website hangs off, which mailbox can reset it, what stops if one of them is lost.
Backups — where they go, what they do not cover, and when anyone last checked one actually works.

A built-in check reads what you have entered and points out the gaps: a sole signatory with no second, a will with no recorded location, one person holding three parts of the business.

It does not hold your passwords

The rule is deliberate and it is enforced: BusinessSafe records where a credential lives — "in the password manager", "printed and in the fire safe" — and never the credential itself. It is a map, not a set of keys.

In this preview, everything you type stays in your own browser, on your own device. Nothing is sent to me or to anyone else. That is why the export button matters: the file you download is your only copy.

I have spent thirty years valuing and selling accounting practices. So this pitch is not about software. It is about the three things that determine what your practice is worth, and how one tool moves all of them.

Advisory work, priced as advisory work

Compliance is under pressure and everybody in the profession knows it — automated, offshored, and competed down to a price. Advisory work is not, because it depends on judgment a client cannot buy cheaper elsewhere.

The difficulty has never been willingness. It is that advisory work needs a starting point, and "we should talk about your business" is not one. BusinessSafe gives you a specific one: a client's dependency score, their single points of failure, the parts of the business that would stop without one person. That is a diagnosis, and a diagnosis justifies an engagement at a rate compliance never will.

Your client's business is 71% dependent on them. Here is what that costs at sale, and here is the twelve-month program to change it.

Clients who cannot easily leave

A tax return is an annual transaction. A maintained record of how a client's business works — reviewed with you, improved with you, with a trend line only you have seen — is a relationship.

It also reaches the family. The accountant is who gets rung when an owner dies, and the firm that had already put that client's affairs in order is not one the next generation shops around.

And what it does to your own practice

This is the part I can speak to with more authority than anyone selling you software. When I value a practice, the questions that move the number are always the same: how much of the fee base recurs, how sticky the clients are, how much of the work is advisory rather than commodity compliance, and how much of it all runs through the partner.

A firm offering this to its clients improves the first three by doing so. And a partner who runs it on their own practice — scoring their own dependency, naming their own single points of failure — improves the fourth.

Which is the honest summary: the thing that makes your clients' businesses more transferable is the same thing that makes yours more transferable. I would start by running it on your own firm before you offer it to anyone.

How it would work

Clients complete their own record. Their data stays theirs and is encrypted — you never see the contents of a client's file.
You see how far each client has got, what has gone stale, and the scores they have agreed to share. Enough to prompt, follow up, and open a conversation.
The firm buys places and offers them to clients annually, under the firm's own name.

Being straight with you: this is a working preview, not a finished product. The client tool exists and is in real use. The firm dashboard is being built. I am looking for a handful of Sydney firms to shape it — not five hundred curious ones.

Fifteen minutes is a win

There are eleven sections. You do not need them all, and trying to finish everything in one sitting is the fastest way to give up.

Do these five and you have already done the part that matters most. Then stop.

Who to ring first.Three or four names, in the order someone should call them.
Where the will is.Or a note saying there isn't one yet. Recording the absence is progress too.
How someone gets into your phone.Where the passcode is written down — not the passcode.
Where the passwords live."In 1Password." "In a notebook in the top drawer." Honest answers only.
What should happen to the business.Sold, kept running, wound down, or handed to someone already inside. One line, and your family never has to guess.

Everything after that is optional, and it keeps until another evening.

Three rules

Never type a password, PIN, account number or recovery phrase

Write where it lives instead. The tool will stop you if you forget, but the habit is the point.

Your data stays on your device

Nothing is transmitted — not to me, not to a server, not to anyone. Which leads directly to the third rule.

Tap Export backup when you finish

Because nothing is stored anywhere else, that downloaded file is your only real copy. Keep it somewhere sensible. If you clear your browser data without a backup, the entries are gone.

Practical notes

Use whichever device you type on most comfortably. On an iPhone, open it in Safari and choose Add to Home Screen so it behaves like an app.
If you don't know what to write, press Guide me in any section. It asks questions instead of showing you an empty box.
"None of this applies to me" is a real answer. Recording that there is no trust, no crypto, no business is useful information, not a gap.
Print it when you're done. Paper needs no password, no battery and no calm — which is exactly what the worst day is short of.

This is a working prototype. Expect rough edges, and export a backup before you close it. Where it confuses you or feels like too much work, that is the most useful thing you can tell me.

Three things every business owner needs.