Beyond Spreadsheets: Experts Explore What the Next Few Years Have in Store for Accounting Technology
2015; American Institute of Certified Public Accountants; Volume: 219; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0021-8448
Autores Tópico(s)Spreadsheets and End-User Computing
Resumo[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Is it the end of an era if virtually no one notices? That question seemed relevant last fall when IBM officially ended support for Lotus 1-2-3, which was once the world's dominant spreadsheet program. Because Lotus was eclipsed by Excel long ago, its demise was barely noticed in accounting circles, where the spreadsheet application was once hailed as revolutionary. A few months after Lotus's quiet goodbye, the JofA gathered three of the accounting profession's top technology experts for the publication's annual technology round table. The experts--David Cieslak, J. Carlton Collins, and Rick Richardson--discussed the current state of technology in the accounting profession, how they foresee technology evolving over the next few months and years, and what CPAs need to do to keep pace. Among the topics that sparked debate was the future of the spreadsheet. Could any current products relegate Excel to Lotus's fate? Or will Microsoft's ubiquitous spreadsheet application stand the test of time? Those questions are addressed in part 1 of a two-part edited transcript of the conversation. Part 2, which will appear in the June JofA, features an in-depth and impassioned discussion about what the experts see as a cybersecurity situation that could prove disastrous for CPAs and their employers and clients. The JofA interviewed the experts in a January conference call. Profiles of the panelists and the first part of the edited transcript follow: THE PANELISTS * David Cieslak, CPA/CITP, CGMA, GSEC, principal and founder of Arxis Technology and a popular technology speaker known as Inspector Gadget. * J. Carlton Collins, CPA, the CEO of ASA Research and author of the JofA's monthly Technology Q&A column. * Rick Richardson, CPA/CITP, CGMA, founder and managing partner of Richardson Media & Technologies and a speaker on the future of technology. What do you see as the future of the spreadsheet? Richardson: A product called Tableau. It's not cheap--about $999 for a personal version. If you want it in a professional setting, it's about $2,000, but it comes not only in a desktop but in server and online versions and offers data engine capabilities that we couldn't get in a spreadsheet--with query capability, easy language development for problem-solution settings. It's pretty slick. Microsoft offers an incredible product called Power BI as part of the Office 365 service--it's a collaborative way to access reports from anywhere on any device. And BI has announced a whole new set of capabilities for interactive charting and graphing, and visualizations for dynamic data that change on the fly as the user is looking at it. So some of those features are going to be even more important to us--like dashboards and the ability to support other software-as-a-service (SaaS) kind of applications like Salesforce or XenDesktop or even Microsoft's own Dynamics CRM Online. The ability to have that functionality native on a tablet like an iPad becomes an incredible tool for the professional. It really does move past that point of just the traditional spreadsheet rows and columns to a brand-new level of data analysis. Cieslak: One of the products we work with is Adaptive Insights, and it essentially positions itself as a replacement to the spreadsheet--a super spreadsheet if you will. It still uses the rows-and-columns paradigm, but it allows you to do high-powered financial modeling, financial reporting, consolidations, budgets, and forecasting. With this approach, you're leveraging people's comfort and familiarity with spreadsheets but then saying, Let's bring some more horsepower to the mix. It could be a SaaS-multitenant solution like Adaptive or Host Analytics or even an Excel-based add-on like BizNet, which is another product we've been working with and are very delighted with. …
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