When will accounting meet the the mobile-touch-cloud disruption?
It has already met it, actually. I will prove it to you later. In order to understand disruption and accounting I have to explain how a normal accounting program is like. They are normally divided into General Ledger (GL), Account Recieveable and Account Payable (ARAP), Salary, Warehouse, Invoice and order and so on. Personally I’ve sold quite a few different programs from several providers, some of them from myself. And typically this structure also is reflected the whole way into the database. So, bear over with me, I will soon leave the technocalities, they more than often have a table for each of the modules. And then they update everything to the General Ledger.
There are national differences: Japan tended to have separate books and programs for Balance, Profit and Loss and ARAP. Sweden and most of Europe had separate books and programs for GL and ARAP. Norway has long had just one book and one program. The OMG General Ledger Facility, financed by EU, proved in 2000, with the vote from IASC, pointed out that GL was suitable for all. I happended to lead that standardization.
There are two notable extemptions to that as far as I know ; it’s SAP and my own iFacturas and the Azure GL21 backbone. In SAP everything is seen as a GL transaction. And ARAP for instance, is only a subview of that.
A disruptive model will bring this even further.
Let's also take a look at the GL UI. Normally the GL UI is some sort of diary where you enter transactions, lots of them. When finished, the diary sees that the sum is zero then posts it to GL. But then you had to understand credit and debit, and the whole double entry way of doing things.
Long time ago, in the beginning of the nineties, I think, Quicken from Intuit changed that. They let us work from the bankaccount as it was a notesheet from the check-book. We could even work from a check like form if we preferred that.
Still most accounting software use the diary model, forcing their users to have to learn and practice the old art of accounting. Disruption will came from wide usage of the Quicken way of doing accounting.
And don’t forget Intuit’s newest jewel, Mint. They simply surpass accounting totally. They grab on your behalf all the information from your account and use some intelligence to assign accounts to the transactions. Disruption will also need this approach.
In Facebook you now can check the place you are in. It uses geolocation - with the help of your mobile GPS it located the place you are and look if it can let you check in someplace near you. In a mobile era disruptive accounting must also accomodate geo-location.
Finally, new user experience has evolved thanks to touch and apps. A mobile phone doesn’t have the screen optimized to work through endless menus and screens. An app is a quite concrete application that normally does one thing, and does it very well: touching instead of shortcuts or mouse-clicks makes for a much more intimate control of the programs, and make it much easier to learn. Disruptive accounting must clearly provide support for touch and in the app format.
The last part I will cover is the storage of the accounting data. Accounting is normally stored in premise servers, in-house or in datacenters. The mobile terminal, is so dependent on high performance that we now need better solutions. Cloud services like Microsoft SQL Azure provides that. They can deliver answers to your phone ten times more rapidly than from your own server. So the cloud is a part of the disruption too.
To sum up. Disruption in accounting needs to have the following:
There may be other elements, do you think I miss something?
Next post will show you how iFacturas and GL21 meets these criterias for disruption.
There are national differences: Japan tended to have separate books and programs for Balance, Profit and Loss and ARAP. Sweden and most of Europe had separate books and programs for GL and ARAP. Norway has long had just one book and one program. The OMG General Ledger Facility, financed by EU, proved in 2000, with the vote from IASC, pointed out that GL was suitable for all. I happended to lead that standardization.
There are two notable extemptions to that as far as I know ; it’s SAP and my own iFacturas and the Azure GL21 backbone. In SAP everything is seen as a GL transaction. And ARAP for instance, is only a subview of that.
A disruptive model will bring this even further.
Let's also take a look at the GL UI. Normally the GL UI is some sort of diary where you enter transactions, lots of them. When finished, the diary sees that the sum is zero then posts it to GL. But then you had to understand credit and debit, and the whole double entry way of doing things.
Long time ago, in the beginning of the nineties, I think, Quicken from Intuit changed that. They let us work from the bankaccount as it was a notesheet from the check-book. We could even work from a check like form if we preferred that.Still most accounting software use the diary model, forcing their users to have to learn and practice the old art of accounting. Disruption will came from wide usage of the Quicken way of doing accounting.
And don’t forget Intuit’s newest jewel, Mint. They simply surpass accounting totally. They grab on your behalf all the information from your account and use some intelligence to assign accounts to the transactions. Disruption will also need this approach.
In Facebook you now can check the place you are in. It uses geolocation - with the help of your mobile GPS it located the place you are and look if it can let you check in someplace near you. In a mobile era disruptive accounting must also accomodate geo-location.
Finally, new user experience has evolved thanks to touch and apps. A mobile phone doesn’t have the screen optimized to work through endless menus and screens. An app is a quite concrete application that normally does one thing, and does it very well: touching instead of shortcuts or mouse-clicks makes for a much more intimate control of the programs, and make it much easier to learn. Disruptive accounting must clearly provide support for touch and in the app format.
The last part I will cover is the storage of the accounting data. Accounting is normally stored in premise servers, in-house or in datacenters. The mobile terminal, is so dependent on high performance that we now need better solutions. Cloud services like Microsoft SQL Azure provides that. They can deliver answers to your phone ten times more rapidly than from your own server. So the cloud is a part of the disruption too.
To sum up. Disruption in accounting needs to have the following:
- Unified GL, ARAP and other modules
- Quicken-like UI
- Automatic bookkeeping
- Geo-location
- Touch
- App approach
- Cloud-based storage
There may be other elements, do you think I miss something?
Next post will show you how iFacturas and GL21 meets these criterias for disruption.
