Page 308 - Accounting Best Practices

c14.qxd 7/31/03 3:25 PM Page 297
297
14–5 Use Data Warehouse for Report Distribution
of business that the new chart of accounts is quite unsuitable for recording
information, requiring the accounting staff to ‘‘shoehorn” data into accounts
that do not agree exactly with the account descriptions. Many companies
find this approach to be much too difficult and expensive to be worthwhile
and will use one of the preceding options instead.
Thus, there is quite a range of options available for converting the chart of
accounts of a subsidiary to that of the parent. The exact option taken will depend on
the level of effort and resources that the parent is willing to put into this effort. Some
of the easier options are quite as reliable as the most difficult, making them worthy
of careful consideration when picking from the range of options presented here.

Cost: Installation time:

14–5 USE DATA WAREHOUSE FOR REPORT DISTRIBUTION

Larger organizations, especially those with multiple locations or subsidiaries,
commonly expend a great deal of time compiling and distributing reports to
employees. This problem arises because each location frequently has its own
general ledger, from which the information is drawn. If any of the information
from multiple locations is to be combined to create summary-level reports, then
either a custom interface must be built to combine the data or else it must be man-
ually combined and inserted into a new report.
An excellent method for avoiding this trouble is to dump selected data from
all of the general ledgers into a central data warehouse. This involves the use of
many customized interfaces that frequently pull the data out of outlying locations
and push it into the data warehouse, so that it contains only the most current
information. Then a set of reporting programs frequently (perhaps every few
minutes, depending on how it would downgrade system performance) accesses
the data warehouse to refresh the information stored in a set of standard reports,
which in turn are made available to employees through the company intranet.
This elaborate shifting and recompiling of data results in very “fresh” data
that employees can use at once, and takes the accounting department completely
out of the business of repetitively compiling reports—though it may still be asked
to create new reports for posting to the intranet site. A key change after this sys-
tem is installed is that the accounting staff will find itself spending much more
time cleaning up the data that goes into the data warehouse. The reason is that
manually compiled reports give the accounting staff time to review the data and
fix any obvious anomalies before they reach the user; however, this automated
reporting system does not allow the accounting staff this luxury, so now its focus
must change toward ensuring that the data is always correct.
A different approach to the data warehouse is noted in the “Use the General
Ledger as a Data Warehouse” section later in this chapter, where one can see