The tech development landscape is rife with unrealized productivity gains when there is an unwillingness or lack of awareness on potential to revamp archaic processes. I know this from talking to a number of developers over the last several years.
Ladies and gentlemen we’re on the cusp of dramatic process improvement, the likes of which we haven’t seen since an incredible invention called Supercalc, or Lotus 123, announced the arrival of a spreadsheet onto the accounting function. Scores of bookkeepers were freed up to perform alternative tasks. Today you know that as MS Excel.
Allow me to quote from a text – “… and how were companies to assign expenses and revenues in this new corporate continuum where there is no obvious end to a business cycle, where ‘no ship arrives to signal that it is time to balance accounts and calculate profits?”
See below, Double Entry, How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance
Sounds like a quote from a recent plea from a trade organization to modernize on Capitol Hill? No – this is a quote rendering what the Merchants of Venice did in late 1400’s Italy!
Friends if we remain wedded to Transaction Value – that is indeed what I just read to you – and do not engage a process that efficiently allows us to align customs with the enterprise books and records, financial accounting, reporting, tax and other functions, we will have rendered Trade as the one function gumming up the works, it’ll be the sand in the gears of progress and liberality.
Yes – enormous numbers of bookkeepers were freed up to perform other more value-added tasks, they were replaced by the computer. You didn’t need to hire a person – you could do it yourself. What’s going to happen is the accounting functions are going to be automated. Accountants managing reconciliations will also be freed up – this has been done – lookup Microsoft Xbox royalty blockchain – 90 days (Excel) to 3 days. Other examples of this in large OEM’s (see Blockchain in the supply chain? Toyota thinks it’s a game-changer) – exact same scenario plays out.
We don’t have a commissioner Von Raab saying automate or perish as back in the 1980’s. What’s going to deliver that message is a tsunami of automation about to hit our shores. This. Is. Inevitable.
References / Further Reading
- Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code, by Primavera De Filippi (Author), Aaron Wright (Author)Publisher : Harvard University Press (April 9, 2018)
- The Rules of Double-Entry Bookkeeping: Particularis de computis et scripturis Paperback – July 11, 2010, by Luca Pacioli (Author), D 1494
- Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance – Jane Gleeson-White, W.W. Norton & Company
(Oct. 7, 2013) - Records of the United States Customs Service, 36.3.1 Records of customhouses and collection districts, Philadelphia, 1790
