I've started my IT career as an Technical Support guy in 1995. Back then, computers in local companies were used mostly for Accounting tasks and word processing. So I've seen a lot of accountants and how they work. What bothered me back then is an amount of manual data entry they did. Fast forward to today, and I still see no significant progress in this area. Sure, I am not as close to accounting professionals as before, but it still seems like some good 50-60% of their job is data entry, with various kinds of reporting filling the rest. Perhaps some kind of "IDE" can solve the efficiency problem, but I doubt it would solve effectiveness issue. Still I completely agree, that open standards for data and common protocols is the way to address this, but as long as accounting software vendors trying to maximize their profits, rather than business outcomes of their customers, I'm afraid we're stuck with what we have.