Modern Financial Systems

Implementing Modern Financial Systems: Taking Your Bookeeper and Accountant to the Next Level, by Doris Cahill, CPA and President of DMC Accounting + Technology Originally published in Zweig White Newsletter

If we were to issue a report card to the AEC industry in regards to integrating financial systems, the industry deserves a whopping C. Of course, this is just one opinion, but having worked on close to 300 financial migrations/integration projects in twenty years, that's my two cents.

Why? What aren't we doing to progress our financial systems? With Blackberries tm , Palm tm devices, cell phones, Internet and the email at our fingertips, why are we not getting an A in financial/project management reporting practices?

We are grossly underutilizing existing applications and we are not making the investment in existing technologies and binding them together.

We should be ashamed to still re-key project or financial information into excel because we've always done it that way. Also, many firms are still processing their invoices in Word. The cost to re-key information will balloon your accounting department to an incredible size. It's not uncommon in a 70pp AE firm to see a full time person dedicating half their month to this task managing multiple re-iterations of financial information and another two weeks to produce the invoicing. Fully automated firms can get this done in the first week of a month. Excel tm and Word tm although easy to use, is more often that not, riddle with financial errors and chasing a moving number as financial information changes.

Our Rolodex and CRM (customer relation systems) do not integrate well with our reporting systems. Solutions such as API technology and ODBC technology are available now or have been available for years. These technologies programmatically have software such as MSProject tm, Sales Logix tm update financial reporting systems automatically. Specifically, this means “real time” not via batch processing. Without learning new front-end applications you can position your firm to tie in existing applications or choose new applications that tie in with this technology. It's worth mentioning Excel does have ODBC capabilities but it's rare to see them in use in an accounting department. If you see this at all it's with your project manager on his non-integrated budget worksheet.

Can this scenario be your accountant department and how did your firm get to this place? Surprisingly, it happens right under your own nose and under your own direction.

Often the accountant/bookkeeper/office personnel are initially selected with out technology attributes in mind. Additionally, this person may not possess any accounting knowledge at all. In fact, their first position may have been assisting with the telephones, and then progressing to handling the checkbook as the owner is tied up running the business. They are selected because they have trusted knowledge and fill other critical roles as well, such as human resources and facilities management. They likely invented the systems in place and are comfortable and use to them. An owner frequently feels a special dedication to them as they could have been with the firm since day one. They came to help you out a low pay initially. However, they are now key to financial integration decisions or non-decision. Unfortunately, if this sounds like you, your project managers have compounded the problem by advancing non-integrated solutions so that can manage their projects. It's definitely you if the accounting looks like a mess and timely reports are always one excuse away from being produced.

As your firm grows your accounting department needs to grow. Grow in terms of new systems and accounting knowledge, not just body count to get the job done the same old way. It's not cheap, the initial price to get going seems expensive, but is less if you measured it with the inefficiency costs and the lack of timely/accurate information. Accounting is an expertise which personnel eventually need to receive formal education to master. Accounting has value that is an untapped resource. Technology exists, but we need to use it and educate on it. It's an untapped approach competitive market.

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