Always something new to learn

Published on 29 January, 2007 in Excel. 0 Comments

It had occured to me that design patterns for using Excel effectively would be very useful. Simon Murphy last week pointed out to me that I’m far from the first person to think of this and gave me a link to Dermot Bolson’s Excel design patterns. These are excellent, although I’m sure that more could be added. In particular, the Merge pattern is both new to me and highly valuable. It’s a gem. Excel standard colours

Looking around the rest of Dermot’s site I discovered that it’s possible to change colours in Excel. I can barely believe I haven’t seen this before. I feel pretty dumb when I think back to all of those times I’ve struggled and failed to find sufficient useful colours in the standard palette.

There’s always something new to learn.

Style upgrade for moverve.com

Published on 24 January, 2007 in Business. 1 Comment

You don’t need me to tell you that I’m not a graphic designer… the styling of moverve.com says it all. I had been intending to find a professional designer to provide a more accomplished image but didn’t obtain a good first response from the several that I contacted. Perhaps the problem was that my expectation of the likely cost was too low.Moverve.com re-styled

Anyway, in an attempt to make the site look less like it was created by an accountant, I’ve put some more effort into the style, as you can see here. Hopefully visitors will now find it to be a little more attractive and welcoming.

I still intend to get a professional in to do a proper job, but I’m now content to leave that for the future so that I can get back to developing Isolist, my forthcoming software product.

Accounting System Required

Published on 11 January, 2007 in Management Accounting. 5 Comments

Some very small businesses don’t have accounting systems because either the owner doesn’t know how to account, isn’t aware what benefits might be gained or simply doesn’t have the time. The only one of these that applies to me is that I don’t have the time, but that’s no excuse so I’m on the look-out for a suitable system.

I’ve been thinking about this for a little while. A majority of small businesses use an off-the-shelf package such as Sage or Quickbooks, but I’m not keen on these. My dislike for accounting packages designed for non-accountants is that, in aiming to make accounting easy, they determine too many of the decisions and implement too many rules, resulting in inflexibility. What this boils down to is the accounting package takes upon itself the role of Controller and delegates the role of clerk to the user – and the Controller character played is pretty strict.

If demand is anything to go by (Sage and Intuit Quickbooks between them have 54% of the UK market for companies with less than 10 employees) this is what many users want. With my background I wouldn’t be satisfied: I want to be the controller.

You may have heard or come across “open source” software before – basically that is software available for free. There are several free accounting systems around and I’ve decided to trial some to see whether they meet my needs. I will post my findings back here as I go.

Before starting, my expectations are that open source offerings will be more flexible than Sage or Quickbooks but most certainly less professionally finished and therefore probably less efficient to use.

My system requirements aren’t too demanding. Here’s a short list:

  • Include general, sales and purchase ledgers
  • Decent provision for user-defined account codes
  • Period accounting with twelve periods per year
  • Control over year-end closing procedure / journals
  • Hold at least two years of data for live enquiry
  • Efficient journal entry screens
  • Separation of the tasks of journal entry and journal posting
  • Import journals from external files (Excel, CSV, etc.)
  • Facility for holding budget data, with efficient entry or import of budget data
  • Efficient and informative account enquiries
  • Effective report generator for financial statements
  • Access to data for in-depth and advanced reporting
  • Provisions for full data export (in anticipation of moving to another system in the future)

Let battle begin.

Reconciliation Add-In for Excel

Published on 2 January, 2007 in Business and Management Accounting. 0 Comments

I said in Motivation and Opportunity that I would write about my first product, so I’m now pleased to report that I’m working on “IsoList”, an add-in for Excel that provides a reconciliation function for accountants.

Reconciliation is a very common recurring task for many management accountants, arising where the value recorded in one place needs to be reflected accurately in another. Given their responsibility to record and report organisational activities and, further, be able to substantiate the financial results, accountants need to ensure that their general ledgers correctly reflect the transactions sourced from other systems – the task called reconciliation. If you are a management accountant then you’re likely to be familiar with it.

Reconciliation Tools

The basic tool that accountants choose for this task is very often Excel. I do so myself, whenever I have the source data in a useful electronic form.

In truth, a database system such as Microsoft Access might be a stronger application to use. The matching of records in two separate tables is a core function of Access, not of Excel. Nonetheless, Access does have some downsides for the average accountant. It is less familiar, its workings are more opaque and therefore harder to trust and it’s harder to manipulate individual records or calculations when required.

As well as being the application of choice for many management accountants, Excel is also a very common crossing point in data exchange between different systems. Many systems can export to or import from Excel directly and if not, can use CSV formats that are Excel-compatible.

Going with the flow, therefore, IsoList is an Add-In for Excel – i.e. a program that extends the native functions of Excel. With IsoList, an accountant will be able to continue working in Excel as usual, but achieve significant gains in the mechanical part of a reconciliation – matching off records that match and identifying those that don’t.

I’ll update with news on the development progress as it happens.

CPD Evidence Summary Workbook

Published on 16 December, 2006 in Excel. 2 Comments

Following my previous post I’ve tidied up the workbook that I used to record my CPD activities and made it available here. I know it’s not much, but I was quite pleased with its simplicity and with actually getting those SUMPRODUCT arrays to work as intended. Let me know if you’ve any comments.