I’ve unintentionally worked with and helped implement systemization and automation over a dozen different accounting systems and ERPs. They blur together.
Since I have a tech background, it’s not uncommon for me to say an accounting system or ERP is just line item rows moving though tables leaving their history behind… and how do you need it… and now it exists, haha.
A few questions:
- Journals and accounts are traditionally taught as the manual way to track different financial activities and ensure accurate reporting. Journals capture transactions as they happen, while accounts categorized them for analysis. Now that we have databases and reporting tools, is there a sense of where reporting or crunching things like profitability, job costing, etc could be built up from this?
Account code migration - when implementing a new accounting system, companies tend to dither over getting their GL right, or changing it up at implementation. Being able to maintain that history could help migration of data easier.
As someone who has helped design and lead implementations overall, with accountants handling their part, accounting depts can get caught in trying to do a lot with accounts and journals in lieu of a report.. while databases have allowed ERPs to report in ways (dimensions, etc) that might not be about accounts or journals alone.
Mostly I’m thinking about organizations that wanted to build up calculation of profitability by asset, or resource or service, or product, and how a project like this could help people easily do it from these first principles.