nexia debrah & co. · nexia debrah & co. mr. kwame manu-debrah practising accountancy in a...
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Nexia Debrah & Co.Mr. Kwame Manu-Debrah
PRACTISING ACCOUNTANCY IN A TECHNOLOGY WORLD: (B) SMPs – THE PRACTITIONERS’ PERSPECTIVE
Member firm of Nexia International
Key Issues identified:
• The Practice of Accountancy;
• In a world where only Technology matters; and
• The experiences and perspectives of the
Small/Medium Accountancy Practitioner.
The Practice of Accountancy
Accounting involves:• identifying
• measuring
• recording
• analyzing
• summarizing and
• communicating
Accounting transactions and events of a business in a manner that complies with its policies and procedures
(Oxford dictionary of Accounting; 2005 3rd Edition)
Questions of interest:
• How really should Accountants identify, measure,
record and communicate?
• And what is the most effective way to do this?
Accountant & Technology
The Accountant, as one responsible for the
• systematic
• comprehensive
recording of financial transactions pertaining to the business, is
faced with numerous challenges and immense opportunities,
especially where technology becomes an important equalizing
factor.
Gartner (2010), Unstructured Data
• 80 percent of business data was now unstructured
• growing at a compound rate of 50 percent each year
Clients and employers who now expect to have work
completed in near real time and expect to have
accounting information readily available at the click of a
button
Time factor
In a World Where Only Technology Matters
tekhnologia (systematic treatment),
“technology”
and may be considered to mean the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry.
Early times of Accounting and IT
• Interestingly, the Accounting function was the early driver of
information technology in business.
• The first business computer, the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO),
was built by Lyons, a British catering company.
Early times of Accounting and IT
• In 1951, the computer ran a program to evaluate the costs,
prices and margins for that week’s output of bread, cakes and
pies. In 1954, it took on the weekly calculation of the company’s
payroll.
• LEO was primitive by today’s standards, taking 5,000 square
feet of floor space!
Storage and Portability
Those Days Today
Technology and Cost
This flexibility comes with costs, the relevance of whichshould be well measured against the relative benefitsto be achieved
Tech Issues
Proprietary
• guarded Source Code
• Expensive
• Vendor Lock Ins
• Exclusive Backend Databases
Open Source
• Available source code
• Free
• No vendor lock Ins
• Accessible backend
databases
Proprietary vrs Open source
THE EXPERIENCES AND
PERSPECTIVES OF THE
SMALL/MEDIUM ACCOUNTANCY
PRACTITIONER
• The perspective of the Practitioner is indeed co-terminus with
the expectations of the client. Any other perspective is clearly
out of line.
• Clients expect sound advice from their Accountants, especially
those that can make them commercially competitive.
Two Keys Issues
• The client expects more than just audit from the practitioner
• The client look up for guidance and advice
• The application of appropriate technology can be a very
useful business equalizer
• However, technology isn’t cheap
Experiences
What is the way forward?
Durable, reliable, secure, cost effective Open source accounting softwares like:
• FrontAccounting
• WebERP
• Oovoo (formerly OpenERP)
• Triton (an OpenERP fork)
• Apache OfBiz and others
Available Platforms/ operating Systems
• GNU/Linux (example Ubuntu)
• Fedora
• OpenSuse
• Trader increases daily sales from an average of GH¢12,000 to
GH¢30,000 after implementing ERPNext (an open source
application).
• Manufacturing Concern Experiences Cost reduction in
material usage after implementing ERPNext.
Practical Examples and Experiences
• Open Source can be a great game changer in how the SMP threads the
balance of his/her client to cut costs and stay technologically
competitive.
• As a Practitioner, there is no need to master all the available platforms
and technological options.
• It is sufficient to pick one, and become a master of it to enable you
serve your clients well in this business world where only technology
matters.
Conclusion
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION