Ways to irriatate an accountant – #1

This drives me crazy...

I'm working on my year end at work, and we have a pretty tight deadline to get it out the door.  Naturally, time is of the essence, and anything that slows me down gets me a little frustrated.  This particular problem has been one of my pet peeves since we got this software in a few years ago.  So here goes... if you are building a system, and want to irritate the accountant, here's one way:

Build a General Ledger program that doesn't hold a true mapped chart of accounts, and suppress printing of zero transaction accounts.
I've used at least 4 different G/L packages where you could specify both the account and valid departments in the chart of accounts.  Try and run a G/L listing for an invalid combination, and it comes back with an error that says that you can't.  Kind of what you'd expect really.

With this program, though, rather than put in a true mapping, they just decided that you couldn't post a transaction to an invalid account/dept combination, but they never linked the reporting to that logic.  Instead, they just search the database for any transaction that matches.  Finding none, it won't print a report.

Normally, that would be okay.  The problem is that this becomes an issue for valid accounts.

I am an accountant, and I need to know show a report that tells me what the balance of the account is.  I NEED to be able to print a report that shows the value is zero.  These idiots wrote their program with the following logic:

If the opening balance is zero AND the count of transactions for the period is zero AND the ending balance is zero THEN suppress the printing.

Great.  I actually do have accounts where this happens.  I still want the report, and I can't get one.

As if that weren't bad enough, it gives you no warning when this happens.  No error message, no nothing.  As far as you can see, it prints just like any other report... until you run down the hall to the printer... and wait... and wait... and ask everyone if they took your report... and try it again...  It usually manages to waste at least a couple of minutes before you actually figure out what happened.  🙁

I put this one down to stupid programming logic, and ignorance of the true business need, personally.