But does it have to be true? I don’t think so. GIGO shouldn’t be the lame excuse that let’s your system continue to fail. You should expect more. Software that’s so dumb that it gives up at the first hurdle is just not trying hard enough. I see no reason why systems shouldn’t try to do a bit of “garbage recycling” and aim to make something good out of imperfect inputs.

That’s the promise of the Text Search match in Isolist, and now also in ReconSilo.

A Text Search match is a type of sub-string match, where the text in field A is required to match part of the text in field B. However, rather than requiring precise alignment of the substring in field B, a Text Search match allows for defects and inconsistencies. It accepts that the data presented for reconciliation might not be consistently arranged, and tries to find field A’s text anywhere within the text of B.

Text Search match type matches a code at any position in the opposite field.

This is often valuable when some of the data you must reconcile has been hand-typed, for example in a descriptive field. ReconSilo can now use that data to identify matching records automatically, which otherwise would have to be identified by you.

ReconSilo will join Isolist as my second reconciliation application. It’s an entirely new and substantially bigger tool, providing many of the full reconciliation process features that just don’t fit inside of Isolist. Features such as carrying forward unmatched records, manual editing of matches, capacity to handle hundreds of thousands of records and full activity logging are all new and put ReconSilo into a different class.

Creating a new application from scratch meant I could build something that I’m passionate about: software that’s a joy to use. Too many applications, especially in the business world, look and feel just as they did way back in the the early 90s. To use them you must scrute the inscrutable icons on the tool-bar, or else wade through endless menus and dialog boxes to accomplish every single task. And they force users to convert their mental understanding of the task they need to perform into the different representation of that task as implemented by the software. Working this way is just not pleasant.

Software that works well, with a high quality, easy-to-use interface, is inevitably more costly to create but will pay off with much stronger user acceptance. Not only do I want to create software that I want to use, but I want lots of you to want to use it too.

Of course, regardless of how it looks and feels, an application must be capable of doing the job required. So the guiding principles in ReconSilo’s development are:

1. Be flexible and powerful enough to complete all of your reconciliations
2. Be as simple and engaging to use as possible with a rich, visual display

The pre-release version of ReconSilo 1.0 is now available and the final release is only weeks away. You can try it out for free. If you do, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Turn your card over. What do you see; useful content or a missed opportunity?

There are several things you could do with the back of your business card. If you’re like me, you’ve got cards in your collection from people you don’t remember, working for businesses you don’t understand. So why not use the space available to spell out what you offer or the benefits your business can provide. Give me some context to help me remember you and I’ll be more likely to call you in the future.

Here’s another idea. Chuck Green suggests including some useful information on the back of your card. Why? Because you want people to hold on to your card ’til they need it. If you’ve given them something useful along with your contact details then the lifetime of your card in other people’s hands should go up.

The reverse of my new card lists my favourite Excel keyboard shortcuts. These are the best ones, the ones that save me from having to reach for the mouse every few seconds. I think they’re great so, if you get one of my cards, try them out the next time you’re in Excel.

Come to think of it, do you like my cool new software, Isolist version 2.0?

Isolist adds powerful reconciliation capabilities to Excel. It’s been around for about 18 months and has been popular with a small number of users. The intent with version 2.0 is for Isolist to be popular with a rather larger number of users. To that end, the reconciliation logic is significantly more flexible and at the same time it’s faster and more fun to use.

So, if you reconcile two sets of data, give Isolist a try. It can be downloaded, installed and tested literally within minutes. The video is there so that you can see even more quickly whether Isolist is what you need – take a look!

By the way, I’m well aware that this post is pretty much entirely self-serving on my account. I’ll be posting more for you, the reader, in future, I promise.

• Have a hot IT team, capable of establishing reliable, secure, performing systems within budget? Check.
• Have a keen finance team, dedicated, involved, trusted? Check.

So where’s the gap?

It’s certainly there. I know it is because I often can’t deliver the information that managers want; I can’t answer the root cause questions to the numbers that I present. This gap is a cause of systems falling short of expectation, of organisations not being able to get out of their systems what they are looking for.

The bases are not covered

I believe the gap arises where

1. accountants take responsibility for the content and meaning of data but not how to store and retrieve it, and
2. IT people take responsibility for storage and retrieval of data but no accountability for what the numbers mean or how they are presented^*, but
3. nobody understands both.

* – I’m grateful to Stephan-Robert Langer for giving me this characterisation of how accountants and IT people relate to data.

The same gap is identified by David Carter in his call to accountants to break up the BI party.

Filling the Gap

I think I’ve long recognised this gap, because I invariably took on the role of filling it in all of the companies I worked for. So who is in the best place to fill it, an IT person willing to learn financial concepts and take on responsibility for the meaning of data, or an accountant not afraid to grapple with SQL, data normalisation and storage technologies?

It sounds a tough call on both counts, doesn’t it? However, the pragmatic answer is clear. At the end of the day, the accountant is accountable for the numbers, and if that means straddling the gap into IT skills to ensure they can be delivered and explained then that needs to be done. No one else is going to do it.

As explained in an earlier post, Isolist is an AddIn for Excel, providing a dedicated reconciliation function that matches the records from two data lists and identifies any mismatches. The requirement to perform such list-matching tasks is wide-spread:- certainly for management accountants but also, I believe, more generally too.

To get the ball rolling, I’m giving a special offer to users of the Beta version who can find and let me know of any bugs or other problems with the product. If you find a genuine software problem, I’ll send you a free license for version 1.

Me – Creating spreadsheets is a little bit like programming. In fact, you could say that it is a sort of programming.
Friend – Programming? Spreadsheets? They don’t look like programming to me.
Me – I admit the ‘programming language’ is unusual and very high level, maybe like a 4GL, but look at what’s happening: You start with a blank sheet, you give the computer a set of rules and some input data and it generates outputs. Conceptually that’s a program, isn’t it?
Friend – [with a sceptical look] Hmmm.

I’d forgotten that converstion until today when I read Writing formulas is computer programming.

Of course it makes no difference whether or not you call using a spreadsheet programming. The fact that you could call it programming, though, is interesting because it indicates that programming needn’t be scary or nerdy. If you can accept that then you’re more likely to make more effective use of your PC.

Anecdotal aside

I say ‘ought’ because I’ve had one of those experiences where I’ve taken a job in a business and found that bank reconciliations had not been done for eighteen months. Having the most fundamental of accounts not in good order is a clear indicator that lots of other problems are hidden in the accounts. It makes for an uncomfortable period as Controller when, over several reporting periods, more and more things come out of the woodwork as the balance sheet is trued up. In my case, bringing the bank account up to date took several solid days of work, but bigger problems were found elsewhere. Maybe others of you have had similar experiences.

Other sources of reconciliation

Back to the subject of the post, in addition to reconciling bank statements, accountants may face several other reconciliation tasks, on either a regular or an occasional basis. Do you recognise any of these?:

• Business systems to general ledger. Some organisations operate a mix of applications, either through historical accident or by design in order to cover needs that are not met by a single application. For example, if the sales order and customer invoicing system is separate to the accounting system then reconciliations are generally required to ensure that revenues are correctly accounted for.
• Intercompany and branch office accounts. Organisations with more than one location or subsidiary frequently share resources and fund or borrow from one another. Where a separate ledger is run for each subsidiary, it is necessary for the intercompany accounts in each one to be matched in order that they remain consistent with one another.
• Stock-take to inventory system. Common in organisations that hold physical stock, different inventory systems give varying levels of assistance to the stock-take process. An accountant or colleague may be required to reconcile a physical count with the system inventory balances.
• Sub-ledger to general ledger. Even where systems are well integrated, it’s often prudent to check that transactions originating in a sub-ledger have not gone awry when posted to the general ledger. Reconciling control reports from each side is not uncommon.
• Closing balances to opening balances. You might think that it should never be necessary to reconcile a previous closing balance to a current opening balance but, unfortunately, the world simply isn’t perfect. When posting a year end journal, both human and system errors are possible. A different scenario might be where a group accountant receives trial balances from subsidiaries month by month, but the latest figures somehow don’t match properly with last month’s…

It’s at the boundaries between systems where the need for reconciliations arises. Maybe you recognise some of these tasks in your own work. I’ve certainly spent much time working on a wide variety of reconciliations over the years and the famous bank reconciliation is typically the easiest and quickest. It’s because reconciliations are so common that I decided, as my first product, to create a tool to make the task as easy as possible. Progress is steady and I’m planning to have Isolist ready for public testing about one month from now.

MVC

Many people will be unfamiliar with the “Model-View-Controller” pattern used in programming, so I’ll expand briefly on the idea and reasoning.

The basic idea is that a complex program is usually more robust and easier to work with when composed of separate, well-defined modules that work co-operatively. In the MVC pattern, the “model” broadly stands for the program module that holds data and the “view” is the program module that presents the data to the user. The pattern involves making these separate and, in particular, ensuring that the data is independent of how it is viewed.

Achieving this separation provides several huge benefits, including:

• data can be tested for accuracy and completeness independently of any other factors, such as whether a report has ‘read’ the data correctly,
• the work involved in maintaining and updating views/reports is limited to only one part of the program; the data itself remains intact and safe,
• it becomes very easy to provide multiple and different views of the same data, without having to duplicate or modify the data in any way.

Implication for Excel

Excel provides blank worksheets, inviting you to structure your data however you like. Learning from the MVC pattern, we should provide good structure, even though Excel doesn’t require it. Generally this will involve capturing data in clean lists and using separate sheets, pivot tables, etc. to provide the output that we want.

For small, one-off workbooks, don’t bother. But if you have lots of data, or will be using the same workbook over a period of time, then consider keeping your data and your reports separate.