Journal Entries in a Shifting Accounting Industry

As an accountant, whether working in public or industry, we have all created or reviewed journal entries. We post journal entries to the general ledger to accurately report financials to the stakeholders.

What is the answer? Automation.

We are living in an information technology era and all financial related industries are changing rapidly. The industry is moving away from manual processes and being pushed toward data analysis. Qlik, Tableau, and IDEA are being used to hold and analyze billions of rows. We believe that within the next ten years, manual journal entries will become obsolete. As fast as Digital Finance is growing, many are utilizing tools that can efficiently help with manual work. Journal entries can take from hours to days to complete, depending on how much detail and analysis that needs to be done.

What tools can be used to automate journal entries?

• VBA
• Power Query/SQL
• Sikuli/Python
• Automation Anywhere
• Google Script
• Tableau
• Qlik
• Superset
• Knime

This list could go on and on….There are many tools to choose from.

How do I pick the best tool to use?

It depends. Let’s say your entry requires millions of rows of data that needs to be looked at. VBA interacts with Microsoft Excel and excel has a million-row limit so unless the data is being stored in a data model that is appending multiple text files, we can use other tools. Tableau and Qlik can hold large hundreds of millions of rows of data that can be pivoted into a journal entry. If your journal entries are completed in excel, VBA and Google Script are suitable automation tools that can be used to manipulate data and create journal entries.