Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

14–5. Use Data Warehouse for Report Distribution

Larger organizations, especially those with multiple locations or subsidiaries, commonly expend a great deal of time compiling and distributing reports to employees. This problem arises because each location frequently has its own general ledger, from which the information is drawn. If any of the information from multiple locations is to be combined to create summary-level reports, then either a custom interface must be built to combine the data or else it must be manually combined and inserted into a new report.

An excellent method for avoiding this trouble is to dump selected data from all of the general ledgers into a central data warehouse. This involves the use of many customized interfaces that pull the data out of outlying locations and store it into the data warehouse, so that it contains only the most current information. Then a set of reporting programs frequently (perhaps every few minutes, depending on how it would downgrade system performance) accesses the data warehouse to refresh the information stored in a set of standard reports, which in turn are made available to employees through the company intranet.

This elaborate shifting and recompiling of data results in very “fresh” data that employees can use at once, and takes the accounting department completely out of the business of repetitively compiling reports—though it may still be asked to create new reports for posting to the intranet site. A key change after ...