ask-the-founderlisted

# Ask the founder The scarcest resource in a catch-up is the owner's attention. Everything here is about spending it well. A list of thirty questions gets zero answers. Five specific ones get five answers, and usually a sixth thing you did not know to ask. ## Hard gates - **Never ask what the books already answer.** Mine the history first. Asking where a vendor goes when the last forty transactions all went to the same place wastes the one thing you are short of and makes the tool look like it is not paying attention. - **One question per paragraph, each ending in a question mark.** An implied question gets an implied answer. - **Never ask for a decision you should be making.** "Should this be an expense or an asset?" is usually your job. "Was this trip for the Berlin office or personal?" is theirs. The test: does answering it require knowing something that happened in the world, or knowing accounting? - **Record every answer with a date and a source.** An undated answer is indistinguishable from a guess in a month. - **Ten at a time, maximum**, ordered by what unblocks the most work. ## Run it ``` python3 bin/books.py questions --profile profiles/mine.local.json --round 1 ``` Writes `questions/round-1.md`, drawn from what the profile could not settle and what the categorizer parked. Each question carries the vendor, the amount, the date and, where it helps, what you will do with each possible answer, which often lets them answer in one word. Record an