Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Will Things Ever Change?

While helping a local municipality get back on their feet after a recent disaster that destroyed most of their records and computer systems, I was amazed by the number of spreadsheets that they used to support their financial system.

Their financial system uses “Buckets” (see blog article “Can the Buckets!”), and their fiscal year-end is right in the middle of all of the summer-time projects.  Or, these projects extend beyond 12 months.  Because of this, the only way they were able maintain a complete accounting of these projects is by using spreadsheets.  LOTS of spreadsheets!  They also confessed that the accuracy of these reports was inconsistent and unreliable.  They spent many fruitless hours trying to reconcile.

To make matters worse, they didn’t have a set procedure on how information was to be posted.  At first, data was entered into the GL, and then the data was transferred to the appropriate spreadsheet from GL reports.  Later, they made the initial entry into the spreadsheet, and then posted it to the appropriate account in the GL from the spreadsheet report.  Phew!  I’m tired just thinking about it.

Of course, mistakes and transpositions were made using both methods.  Reconciling was next to impossible because they couldn’t be sure which posting method was used, or what baseline numbers were correct.

It’s the same old problem.  When will we get software that really addresses the needs of running a business? 

Will things ever change?