SEE IT NOW!

This blog started off as an article about the shortcomings of several Payroll systems.  I then had an epiphany; the problem applies to almost every financial package....

This blog started off as an article about the shortcomings of several Payroll systems.  I then had an epiphany; the problem applies to almost every financial package! 

There are times when you need to research an employee’s pay history, a vendor’s invoice, a customer’s payment, or details behind a journal entry in the G/L.  The only way this information can be gathered, in some financial systems, is to run report after report (that’s if your lucky).  You go to all the effort to enter data, and then you can’t get to it.  How many times has management walked in and wanted to know why the A/P clerk hasn’t paid Dwarski Construction, or how much overtime has Ruthie Fredawitz been paid in the last 6 weeks?  Usually management wants that number NOW! 

How much effort do you go through with your current system to trace every action performed on a vendor’s invoice?  Wouldn’t it be nice to see when the invoice was received, posted, paid (and how), or what discounts were taken?  How about a digital image of the invoice and appropriate signatures without running reports or going to 10 different screens?  I have seen systems where this information was on 1 screen, but you needed special magnifying goggles to read it! 

There has got to be a better way.  Give us the ability to research at the screen without having to jump through hoops and definitely not by running reports.

This is a major challenge that must be overcome, and it’s a major rewrite to do it correctly.  The omission of this search capability is inexcusable.  It’s like software developers have never been in a true business office environment.  To be quite frank, a great many of them haven’t.

Agree or disagree?