Good summary but the article doesn't mention the engineering of the user interface. In this field of accountancy, I think the UI is an engineering problem at least as important as anything else mentioned in the article.
As someone who works in accountancy (as a bookkeeper/accountant) I have to be brutally honest and say that I've been very disappointed in the UI of all the accounting software packages I've used. None of them give me the immediacy or simplicity of a well organised filing cabinet, they really don't.
I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I can't help thinking that making the double-entry system more visible and apparent to the user would be a good start.
> I think the UI is an engineering problem at least as important as anything else mentioned in the article.
Indeed.
> I'm not sure what a good solution would look like
What is interesting is that on the business reporting side (which is in any case deeply enmeshed with the accounting system side) there is a defacto standard (xbrl and its various specifications [1]) which via web technologies (iXBRL [2]) provides a path towards generic web UI patterns.
This was the same perspective i had as an engineer working on a finance problem for accountants and sales. So i would build a nice reporting tool that had modern ui. The people liked it at first but they always regress to spreadsheet. They just ask me to export the data in spreadsheet.
As someone not in accountancy but having worked in corporate and been forced to work on accounting software for managing budgets, approving transactions etc. - you have really gotten the short end of the stick from general usability perspective. There are so many things that don't make sense - even for the accountants that use the system on day-to-day basis - they have workarounds for (what I would consider) the most basic of things (or over-complicated solutions for something basic like manager approvals for logging expenses - why do I have to click through several screens that don't follow any sort of clear, logical flow). And it's so embedded in an organization - that you can rest assured once that client is signed up they're not switching that system. Same for HR software...
I agree, but also our accountants kept asking for the craziest of things. I guess its a problem that the real world of transactions is full of async processes and weirdness. There is always something new weird that will happen, so it always ends up back in a spreadsheet software.
While I managed our start ups finances, I so much preferred to stay doing everything in Excel over having to use our accountants system. And I get a glimpse into SAP from time to time as my wive is an accountant. It's incredible how shitty those systems are from the user perspective.
But I guess, this is what you get when the user is not also the customer.
As someone who works in accountancy (as a bookkeeper/accountant) I have to be brutally honest and say that I've been very disappointed in the UI of all the accounting software packages I've used. None of them give me the immediacy or simplicity of a well organised filing cabinet, they really don't.
I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I can't help thinking that making the double-entry system more visible and apparent to the user would be a good start.