Gartner
Cool Vendors in Procurement
and Finance, 2008. Click
>>> to read.
Nigel Rayner
Research
Analyst
fast and effective way to close your month and year end independent of your IT staff's availability.
Call in some FAVORS and get Accounting Intelligence from The GL Company® www.TheGLCompany.com
All ERP vendors struggle to provide accounting and finance departments with timely online summary information. Why? Because ERP systems are built on
relational database technology, which is very effective in storing vast amounts of transactional data, just wasn't created to provide summary information. Typically, the first means to overcoming this challenge is to go to paper-based reporting. However, most report writers are difficult to use, require development skills, are slow to run and can't drill down to the underlying transactional data for further analysis. What's more, by the time you have designed, created and run the new report, the data is no longer current and the report is out of date.
To overcome these problems companies are turning to Business Intelligence tools to provide summary information. However, there is again a major flaw; the data has to be duplicated to an OLAP database, a newer type of database structure that has been designed specifically to analyze summary information. This transfer is normally run overnight, therefore a journal entry that is entered at 9.00 am on any given day can't be seen until the transfer and calculation of that day's data into the OLAP cube which is run later that night. This means that it can take as long as 24 hours for the journal to show up on a report, often rendering the report obsolete before it is even reviewed. Additionally, Business Intelligence systems are simply not designed to accommodate the requirements of a frantic month end process.
Shadow Data Systems
Finally to address these
issues many companies use
home grown Excel
spreadsheets or Access
databases as short term
tactical solutions to pull
data directly from the ERP
system. These tools use
scripts, direct links to the
ERP database and complex
macros to build ad-hoc
reports against the data and
are often put together by a
technically savvy business
user. This approach has a
great advantage that the end
users are already familiar
with the applications and a
solution can quickly be put
in place to meet immediate
needs. Spreadsheets and
databases of this kind are
often only partially
documented (if at all) and
come with little or no
security, data integrity
safeguards or version
control. Because they lack
the strong underlying
architecture needed to be
reliable in the long term,
changes become increasingly
difficult and eventually
become unmanageable. (See
www.ShadowDataSystems.com)
Accounting Intelligence
tools combine the best
aspects of both Business
Intelligence and Shadow Data
tools, offering the speed
and simplicity of
implementation and use, with
the security and power of a
full scale Business
Intelligence solution. In
addition, an Accounting
Intelligence solution can
also check the integrity of
an ERP system, ensuring that
what you report on is
accurate and relevant.
The GL Company is the first company to build an "Accounting Intelligence" system to cater for the month
and year end close with the end user in mind. This is a system that has been specifically designed for your finance department and it will change the way you close your month end forever.
