What’s in a Name?

One of the important decisions we’ve had to make was choosing an accountant – in the beginning to help us set up a company and register our business name, and later on to manage our restaurant accounts.

There are two types of accountants here – accountants or expert accountants, so naturally you would think an expert accountant is the better option.

We’d had several recommendations from friends so began meeting these prospective accountants to see how they stacked up. Not having any experience in this field it was hard to tell who was good or not, so again we went on our impressions.

Together we met the first guy, an expert accountant who had been well recommended by a long-term resident of Fes. He seemed impressive, had all the right answers and a professional looking office. He also told us to be wary of many accountants here, who simply put up a plaque and practised accounting without any qualifications. He was well qualified himself, with a degree from France.

Vincent went to see the second candidate, a lady who had been suggested by a couple of people. She, however, was not an ‘expert’ and gave some conflicting answers to the first guy, contrary to the information we had from several sources. We wanted to know when we should set up our company, for tax reasons. She said it was better to do it sooner rather than later, but we’d heard it was better to wait so as not to waste the tax breaks given to new companies – as we wouldn’t be operating for another year.

Based on these impressions, we decided to go with the ‘expert’ guy and were on the verge of starting our business name registration process with him when a lucky intervention made us reconsider.

I was catching up with a friend and mentioned that we’d finally made a decision on our accountant. When I said who it was she paused and said “Hang on a second I think that’s the same guy that *** was using, and she’s just had some major problems with him, let me give her a ring to check.”

On the phone her suspicions were confirmed and she passed me over to our friend who quickly urged me “don’t touch that guy with a bargepole!” It turned out that she had followed the same recommendation we’d been given and had also been impressed with him at the beginning. However, once she had given him her accounts he had been impossible to get hold of and was never available. In the end she had had to force her way into his office to take back her paperwork. “You’d naturally think that the ‘experts’ are better,” she said, “but actually they are often dealing with very big companies accounts, so smaller businesses like ours fall by the wayside and get overlooked. The guy is a nightmare. *** recommended him to me as well, but he is not really business-minded – in future I’d only take his advice on tiling or plastering, not accounting.”

Saved just in time, we had to start the process again from scratch and again began visiting different accountants.

In the end we found a lady (who had also been recommended, but this time by someone who was running a restaurant) who seemed brilliant. She appeared very clued-up on the ins and outs of the Moroccan tax system and was very friendly and approachable, where the other guy had seemed a little arrogant. Most of our friends here actually prefer the female accountants as they’re les egotistical.

She has recommended that we set up our company later on, but ask our builder to make the invoices out to the (future) company so we can put the building expenses through the company and therefore claim back the TVA (20%).

We’ve since taken the first step towards setting up our company, which is registering the business name. You have to choose five options for a name, and then she takes the form to Rabat to see if any of the names are available. We wanted to call it Restaurant Faracha (the Arabic word for butterfly) because my name means butterfly and we’d come up with the name for the house two years earlier when we were signing the papers with the estate agent. Dar Faracha had a nice ring to it and the name had stuck, but we couldn’t call our business ‘Dar’ anything, as we weren’t a guesthouse, as the inclusion of ‘Dar’ in a business name implies. So, we wrote the name we wanted in five different variations eg: Faracha Restaurant, Restaurant L’Faracha etc. When we presented her with the form we were told that we had to write five completely different names, so had to think up four new options on the spot.

We Googled the word for butterfly in the languages that matched some of the cuisine we would serve and came up with Papillon, Mariposa and Farfalle. Farfalle sounded too much like the pasta shape and Papillion had too many connotations from the book and movie of the same name. We then looked up the names of different butterfly genus/species to see if anything jumped out (we’d taken over our accountants laptop while she patiently waited for us to make a decision). The genus Vanessa Cardui was called Painted Lady butterfly, which in French was known as La Belle Dame. We liked these name options so added them to the list. In the end we came up with Restaurant Faracha, Restaurant La Belle Dame, Restaurant Butterfly, Restaurant Mariposa and The Painted Lady Restaurant. We hoped for our first choice, but also quite liked La Belle Dame.

We were told it would take a week or so, but that we should have the reply by December 23rd, my birthday.

The day came and brought with it a very good birthday present – our original choice was available and so Restaurant Faracha was born.