ACCOUNTING AND GLOBALIZATION MARKET

Accounting And Globalization Market

Accounting And Globalization Market

Introduction

After working extensively with both customized and package systems, particularly in accounting, I came to the conviction that there were severe limitations in most of them. At that time [the late '70s], there were mainly mainframe packages available, and there were beginning to be minicomputer packages.

Discussion

Accounting, auditing, and bookkeeping services serve key functions in America's (Pollitt 2007) economic engine. In such publications as The Bottom Line, the global significance of the accounting profession has long been confirmed: "The world's capital markets rely on financial statements certified by independent auditors. If the integrity of those statements could not be trusted, investment would come to a halt and economic growth would be paralyzed.

A lot of them were American; they used to ship them from the States to their distributors or subsidiary offices in each country, and the distributors would change them for local functionality. I can remember needing some software quickly, so we got it directly from the States without going through the UK distributor. All the dates were in the American month/day/year format, and before every amount field there was a dollar sign.

A lot of the software I worked with didn't have enough places before the decimal point for Italian lira or Japanese yen amounts. Or, I can remember working for years and years with an accounting package that had department numbers from 1 to 99. The trouble was that we'd had a convention over a number of years of calling departments by letters instead of numbers. So whenever you entered data, you had to translate "Department A" into "Department 1," and [do the reverse] with all the outputs.

That sort of thing convinced me that I could design and develop software that was more flexible. I felt it should be possible to ...