It discovered that its implementation of a series of stand-alone financial applications significantly increased the time required to complete certain accounting and reporting functions. This new system changed how the accountants maintained, audited and prepared accounts for delivery. The result was a more complex and cumbersome workflow.

 

Accountants had to log onto an IBM mainframe system to obtain an account's summary information. Next, they had to access a second system on the mainframe for detail information. For reconciliation information, they had to go to a third system located on a SQL server.

 

Managers lacked the capability to view online information for all their subordinated accounts. And they could not produce reports that tied together data from all these systems.

 

They called GL Associates for a solution.

 

We designed, developed and built a custom Intranet-based application with a single point of entry to all of the accounting systems. This unified user interface simplified the system by providing the following improvements:
•    A single login to all component applications using standard security applications
•    Accountants could view summary data for all their accounts and summary data for peers' accounts
•    Management provided views of summary data for all accounts and generation of reports
•    Single click access to detail reports
•    Ability to view and update multiple accounts simultaneously

 

GL Associates used Microsoft technologies to implement this n-tiered solution. We designed a Microsoft SQL Server database that we populate nightly and in real time through IBM's MQ Series for Windows NT, OLE, ODBC and FTP. In the middle tier we implemented the business rules using COM objects developed with Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 and managed by Microsoft Transaction Server. The Web pages, which are Active Server Pages, are the top tier. They use custom ActiveX controls including one that downloads data from HTML tables and sends it to Microsoft Excel for additional analysis and reporting.

 

As a result of our efforts the client was able to reduce accounting staff, cut training costs and significantly improve reporting capabilities.

 

This solution was just a first step in a multi-phase approach to bring additional updating and reporting functionality to the accounting department while improving efficiency and reducing costs.