8NOVEMBER 2020IN MYOPINIONThe world is changing at a more rapid pace than I could have imagined in the early 90s when I set out in my career as a Chartered Accountant in England. Accounting and Finance are no exceptions when it comes to the pace of change. The pressure to be the most efficient and fastest at what we do is relentless. Much of this obviously is due to technology, which enables us to handle data so much more quickly than ever before.Every accounting department I've ever walked into has a group of people who are excellent with Microsoft Excel. Spreadsheet skills have differentiated accounting and finance professionals for most of my thirty-years of career. In the early 90s I could produce an extended trial balance faster than most of my peers, written in pencil on a large sheet of paper. It was the way that accountants had done it forever. Then a guy I worked with challenged me to produce one faster than he could. He used a spreadsheet. He won.At that moment I realized that I had to embrace technology if I was to be at the level I wanted to be at. Those who could produce analysis at faster speeds with greater accuracy would rule the accounting and finance world. For the next twenty years I became a spreadsheet expert. I can manipulate data using Microsoft Excel at frightening speeds, as can everyone else who is at the top of their game in my world.In the last decade however, I have seen a shift away from spreadsheets. It used to be enough to be able to extract the data into a CSV file and then manipulate it using Excel. Not anymore. That whole process of gathering the data and manipulating it is now the frontier of efficiency and gains. Take a broken general ledger structure. Add in a sprinkling of foreign subsidiaries. Consolidation, reporting, and forecasting from these inconsistent and difficult to ARCHITECTING A STRONGER AUTOMATION SYSTEMBy Mark Pritchard, Chief Financial Officer, TruRoad HoldingsMark Pritchard
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