Born and raised in India, Dev Purkayastha was always fascinated with business, even at a young age. When he was child, he says there were few business role models in India, so he turned to studying individuals like Ray Kroc and Henry Ford. His interest became a mission to come to the US, to study.
Purkayastha became an accountant by trade, and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Years in venture capital, providing seed funding for small companies, made him appreciate his original training as an accountant. He retired in 1997, but still had his own entities that needed accounting work and “I was disappointed in what I saw around me when it came to part-time accounting assistance,” he said.
He started an accounting outsourcing company, Indevia Accounting, with his own entities being the company’s first client. His business partner was the company’s second client. “Outsourcing accounting has been going on for a long time,” he said. “What I did was take the model and I made it available for companies that are smaller. We are the perfect solution for those businesses.”
The list of services Indevia offers is long, from recording and reporting daily and weekly sales, to offering accurate bank and credit card reconciliations, and everything in between. The goal is to provide savings to the multi-unit operator, while at the same time producing timely reports to help run their business more efficiently.
The company, based in La Jolla, Calif., also has an office in Mumbai, India, with servers hosted in the US. “We have strong management control systems in place,” Purkayastha said. He even designed, himself, a 20-point review checklist to catch mistakes in any of their reports. Each new client is interviewed extensively, so Indevia management learns what they need. Multi-unit owners “need it to run by the numbers, and that was my background as a controller and chartered accountant,” he said.
And in the end, it’s about saving money:
- Indevia reports in real time. For example,the operator will know cash deposit from yesterday, and other reports, as well.
- Indevia offers consistent reporting. “Operators can see their daily food and labor costs and they can vary those based on where they find inefficiencies.”
- Store managers can manage more effectively and can be rewarded (or corrected) immediately when a problem arises. “We facilitate good managers,” said Purkayastha. Accounting is just a gauge, he says, that helps them do better.
When you talk to Purkayastha, he has stories of clients he himself has helped by digging into their financials. One individual was having trouble staying afloat and his vendors had him on COD. “His stores were a goldmine,” said Purkayastha, “but he was spending twice what he was making. We got him a personal financial planner, and he turned it around.”
And once they have the basics in place for a client, once that business grows, Purkayastha can actually dig into more of the details and help them build their business.Accounting isn’t sexy or glamorous, he says, but “its like plumbing. You can have the biggest mansion in the world, but if the plumbing doesn’t work right, you can have a disaster. We provide that necessary, but often neglected, service.”
For more information on Indevia Accounting (http://www.indevia.com), contact Dev Purkayastha, founder and CEO, at 858-450-2981or by e-mail at dev@indevia.com.
