Page 314 - Accounting Best Practices

c14.qxd 7/31/03 3:25 PM Page 303
303
14–12 Overlay with a Consolidation and Reporting Package
cially common right after the financial statements are distributed) can completely
overload the general ledger accountant.
Installing a drill-down capability in the general ledger software is the best
way to surmount this problem. The drill-down system allows one to position the
cursor on the field on the computer screen for which the user wants to find addi-
tional information; the user then presses a button, and the next most detailed level
of information appears on the screen. There may be several levels of information
that can be accessed in this manner, allowing a user to ‘‘drill down” through the
various levels until the needed information is obtained—hence the name of this
best practice.
Though an obvious godsend for anyone who must research detailed informa-
tion through the general ledger, this is not an easy item to install in an existing com-
puter system. In essence, the computer programming staff must redesign large por-
tions of the general ledger programming code so that the field in a high-level screen
is automatically linked to a screen that contains more detailed information, requir-
ing a web of cross-indexes to a multitude of screens (which may be located in other
software packages) before users have a comprehensive drill-down capability. This
is a major programming project, especially if the drill-down capability is given to a
large number of data items, which means that there will be a large number of cross-
indexes. This option is virtually impossible to implement if a company is using a
third-party software package since any periodic update of the packaged software by
the supplier will automatically wipe out all custom programming that the local pro-
gramming staff has done since the last update was installed.
In short, the drill-down capability greatly increases a general ledger accoun-
tant’s overall level of efficiency, but it requires either a large amount of internal
programming time or the purchase of packaged accounting software that already
contains this feature.

Cost: Installation time:

14–12 OVERLAY THE GENERAL LEDGER WITH A
CONSOLIDATION AND REPORTING PACKAGE
It can be extremely difficult to report on the consolidated results of a distributed
company, since there may be a number of different general ledger software pack-
ages in use, some of which run in different computer environments. Though it is
possible to manually consolidate this information, it is a tedious and error-prone
process that also requires a considerable lag time before consolidated reports can
be generated. Also, if anyone has a question about the resulting report, the
accounting staff must research the details in the underlying general ledgers and
then create another manual report—all of which takes yet more time. There are
two ways to avoid this problem. One approach is to create customized interfaces
from each general ledger to a centralized data warehouse, as discussed earlier in