Technology in Accounting
The author of this report is going to offer a fairly lengthy report about how technology has played an integral role in the changing of accounting. Indeed, technology and the internet have changed many things in demonstrable and perhaps immeasurable ways over the years. The author of this report will cover a number of different ways in which technology has emerged and changed things. Topics covered will include, but will not be limited to, pivot tables, API feeds from banks, credit card processing, vendor communication and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The four main dimensions that these technological updates have addressed include speed, accuracy, timeliness and applicability. While these rapid advances in technology have created some logistical, training and security headaches for many accounting and other professionals, the good of technology and how it has changed accounting far outweighs the bad.
Summary
Of course, the gold standard program of history when it comes to accounting would have to be Microsoft Excel. To be sure, there have been other "game-changing" programs for accountants such as QuickBooks and others. However, Excel was perhaps the first major step forward when it came to the transition from paper words and handwriting of accounting documents to the computerization that is so common now. One of the tools that has emerged over years and remains one of Excel's most prominent and powerful tools to this very day would be the pivot table. The beauty of a pivot table is that it allows a large amount of data to be summarized and quantified in a fairly simple fashion. Indeed, there are other ways to do things like averages, counts and so forth in Excel and other programs. However, those who have mastered pivot tables know that Excel is much more robust than a lot of the other (if not most other) solutions out there. Further, the complexity and ingenuity of the pivot table has evolved over the years. For example, it has been an issue with some versions of Excel to get a distinct count of unique values. However, a new data modeling feature of Excel has addressed this. When it comes to accounting-heavy records such as customer, item and sales figures, this can be a very important feature to seize on. As with most things, the pivot table feature in Excel (and other programs that make use of it) is ever-evolving and updating with the times. As technology, software and computers become more complex, so too will be the solutions necessary to complete the proper accounting of the associated behavior and activity (Jelen, 2014). There is speed in pivot tables in that the major limitation in pivot tables is how long it takes for a person looking at the data to center in on what they want. It is accurate in that Excel and other computerized programs do not make mathematical errors. So long as the pivot table is arranged and constructed properly and the data underpinning it is correct, then the results will be as well. The data is timely in that the people making pivot tables are able to assemble and analyze the data in a very quick fashion and it is applicable because it does the same precise thing that others have done for decades…it just does the work much faster.
Another major catalyst for change when it comes to accounting and the financial sphere at large has been what are known as API feeds. API stands for Application Program Interface. It has a lot of applications in the general information technology sphere but some people have started to harness it for accounting and banking purposes. Indeed, a lot of banking and other financial data is now transmitted over API feeds, not unlike a Twitter or other feed of information. There are both older and newer companies that have entered the API feed sphere as a business. One such business is known as SNL. Their entire business is centered behind feeds of data. Of course, this data could be used for accounting as well as other analysis purposes such as investments, auditing and so forth. However, accounting would be the obvious "core" intent behind the analysis whether it is someone who is internal to a firm, someone who is assessing competitors or someone that is analyzing a broader industry. To that end, businesses like SNL offer sector-specific data feeds. These data feeds can be in simple text, XML or other formats. The data is commonly transferred...
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