A lot of people work very hard to make Taiwan a great place to start and build a business. And it is in many ways, but I think I have found an area where it seems government rules are increasing administrative costs compared to other countries. I want to pick your brain to see if you think it might be an issue we can/should address. Or maybe I am completely wrong and un-informed, if so let me know.

How many of you are familiar with accounting software like Quickbooks and WaveApps?

Quickbooks has millions of company customers and costs up to USD40/month. You can download and install internally or you can use their online version.
WaveApps is online only and uses a Freemium business model where if you are a small company you can use their basic services for free forever (for now).
In minutes a company can get started using a professional accounting system and have access to all necessary business financial reports.

One of the functions I like the most with these two programs is that both offer an easy connection to over 10,000 financial institutions. With a few clicks I can connect my online bank with my accounting system and have a one-stop overview of my balances.

The Taiwanese bank Chinatrust’s US subsidiary is connected to this. But their Taiwan branch is not and neither is ANY Taiwanese bank. I checked with friends at Standard Chartered. Their branches in the US, Singapore and many other places are connected to this system, but not their Taiwan branch. My friends at the bank told me this is because of government regulations.

I met last week with Taiwan’s probably largest ERP systems provider and they confirmed they have no system connection to any Taiwanese bank.

I understand the need for security, but let’s look at the costs of these regulations.

1.3 million companies whose book keepers have to spend extra time connecting to online bank (s) and manually transfer information. Let’s say we only waste 30 minutes per week.

Calculation!

1.3 million companies x 0.5 hr x 52 weeks x 250 hourly salary = 8.45 BILLION!!

I am sure we can think of more issues like this. Consider that this money could be applied to marketing or R&D instead of wasting time on copying and pasting.

How much could we add to our Taiwan GDP if we just addressed these issues?