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