Take one look at the world of accounting and you're immediately confronted by a sea of acronyms: IFAD, IAS, GAAP, TAS, TASB, IFRS… A sure sign of people who don't like to waste time. Like soldiers.The military is huge on acronyms -- the US Navy even has a book to help people not waste time, their very own DicNavAb, or dictionary of naval abbreviations. Technically that would be a glossary, but we won't waste their time correcting them.
A quick breeze through the basics of number crunching here gives you these organizations and their acronyms, which is by no means an exhaustive list: Turkish Accounting Standards Board (TASB), International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), Turkish Accounting Standards (TAS), Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), International Forum on Accountancy Development (IFAD), International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), International Accounting Education Standards Board (IAESB), not to mention coordinating agencies such as the OECD, WTO and UNCTAD, the latter three being the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Trade Organization and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
To save time, accountants in Turkey could be advised via the Official Gazette that IFAD had issued an amendment to GAAP, at the recommendation of IOSCO, and that TASB had authorized the adoption of said change in order to comply with EU law, so from today TAS includes said amendment, said amendment having already been approved by the OECD, WTO and UNCTAD.
Now we all have free time to play golf, or maybe to go over that second set of books. Used to be that keeping two sets of books could lead to a jail term. Now it's the norm.
Not only do companies in Turkey regularly run two distinct accounting systems, one for local tax authorities and one for international headquarters or foreign investors, but often enough run these databases on different programs.
A friend who manages a small international subsidiary company in İstanbul mentioned to me the other day how not only do they keep two sets of accounting files, but that the outsourced Turkish accountant has his clerk retype all the data from Excel into another database program.
By chance my manager friend learned that her regional headquarters in Europe has a clerk there key in all the data again -- into their special database. Sounds like a terrific waste of time and energy. And who's paying for all that labor?
A small or medium-sized company can choose from a large variety of accounting software, and even if you stick with the top names you've got to decide what you need and how much vertical integration you want. In other words, does the janitor need to see the sales figures from Antalya?
Most of the top accounting programs boast that they offer a "fully-integrated product" that avoids the need to re-key information in multiple applications, minimizing costly errors. Data entry controls. Who knows, perhaps a simple, fully integrated accounting program from SAP or Microsoft might have saved Société Générale all those billions of euros recently?
Much of the software industry seems to be looking to the future and living in the past at the same time, promising to help clients "streamline" their business processes to maximize efficiency and minimize waste. Of course streamlining came in to fashion about 70 years ago, in the car business, with windswept profiles heralding a clean slice through any air resistance on the road.
Any business looks to cut resistance to progress, resistance to profit, mainly by cutting costs. It's standard business practice today to cut costs all the time, not just in time of crisis, but this is no job for number crunchers. The accountants tell management what is: it is up to management to tell the accountants what could be. More on that later.
