Questions for Webledger providers or Accounting ASPs |
A Decision matrix for CPAs and VARs -- I welcome any
additions or comments on these key questions for any webledger solution:
1. FUNCTIONALITY: Does the webledger enable subscribers to conduct
business over the internet, i.e. send/receive invoices, payments, and orders and pay
bills? Or, is this just a remote control service, running a standalone
accounting package over the internet?
2. PLATFORM: Is this available as a software product? If so,
what is the name of the product? Can you support the small VAR running it as a
micro-ASP? Is it stable? What level of skill is required to run it? How many
hours per week is typical maintenance?
3. BUSINESS MODEL: Or, is this an exclusively internet
service? If so, is this a monolithic national-scale webledger provider who owns and
operates the entire data centers? Or is this something I can get from a variety of
vendors? Will you provide a webledger back-end, enabling local entrepreneurs to
establish branded local ASPs?
4. COST: How much does the webledger solution cost? Are you
billing by the month, by User, or by the transaction? Do you require up-front
investment?
5. JOURNAL BUS: What is the mechanism for Intercompany Journal
Entries or purchasing/selling, between unrelated subscribers on your service? Can we post
transactions to each other within the security/speed of the host? In particular, can
subscribers settle their payables and receivables inside the host to avoid bank fees?
http://www.gldialtone.com/STR.htm
http://www.receipts.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=davidson+receipts+xml
http://www.gldialtone.com/journalbus.htm
http://www.openbuy.org/
http://www.gldialtone.com/hypercub.htm
If so, how much do you charge for business conducted within this trading environment,
between your subscribers?
6. THE SOLE SOURCE PROBLEM: Do you limit
access to your subscribers? Do you permit business to be conducted freely internally
between your subscribers, or with external parties, via XML? What assurances do you
provide that this is not a "Company Store" where pricing for our internet
business processes, and access to suppliers, is controlled by sole source?
7. THE LOCK-IN PROBLEM: With all due respect, what are the exit
options for dissatisfied subscribers? What accounting packages can subscribers export/
download their data to? What XML schema or DTD do you provide for wholesale data
export?
8. THE INCREMENTAL PROBLEM: how can a small business
implement the webledger alongside their existing accounting system, without betting the
company, putting their whole business on it? Broad solutions include
How do we run alongside the webledger? Are you making this an all-or-none proposition?
9. THE TRUST PROBLEM - What are your
privacy policies? Do you read the subscribers' data? Do you sell our data, or
any reports or derivative data based on subscribers' data? Do you disclose the identities
of your subscribers themselves, or market to them yourself?
Can you encrypt everything and let the subscriber keep their own keys, so that NOBODY
could possibly read their descriptions or customer names?
What is your code of ethics? Who audits compliance? Who certifies it?
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/ca/xml/99/11/15/991115caethics.xml
http://www.aitp.org/about/code_of_ethics.html
http://www.icca.org/ethics.htm
http://aicpa.org/webtrust/index.htm
http://www.truste.org/
What bodies are you a member of? ASP Consortium? IBIS
initiative?
http://www.aspconsortium.org/mem.html
http://www.agillion.com/company/press/archive/12.13.99.html
10. SECURITY: Who audits your security. ICSA? Sun?
(http://www.sun.com/sp/features/suntone.html)
What protection
do you offer besides the VPN or SSL browser connection? If another subscriber enters
your host on a VPN what assurance do I have that they will not traverse back to my local
site? Do I need a new level of firewall on my site?
11. WEBLEDGER SERVER AVAILABILITY: What is
your guaranteed maximum downtime (minutes / hours / days)? What happens if a fire or
flood destroys the main office or server site?
What is your server redundancy? Do you have online redundant hardware?
What level of RAID is under the RDBMS? Do you have failover hardware for the RDBMS, Web
Server, Routers?
What is your exact backup routine. How much data could be lost (e.g. just current
transactions / the previous hour / the whole of that day). Is there offsite backup?
12. OFFLINE OPERATION: Does the webledger
design provide any solution for working offline, for example, when the network goes down,
or perhaps, remote offices on modems? What functionality do you have, to prevent business
interruption?
A. Full bi-directional RDBMS replication to local site enabling full add/edit/delete
even during offline periods, or
B. Partial offline func. for at least, running the cash register, web storefront, issuing
invoices?
C. Read-only replication providing at least a minimal picture of customer, supplier
accounts and inventory?
D. or, Fat Client/ data harvest (upload of small accounting system's data files or
journal exports?)
13. CARRIER'S QOS/SLA: Carrier's quality of service or service
level agreement: what is the guaranteed uptime and thru-put on YOUR connection to the
internet/VPN/carrier? Can a fully redundant data path be arranged to customer's
premises, for example a DSL connection or regional wireless carrier?
14. DATA PURGE: What options do you provide the webledger user, for
purging data? Do you have an option to keep multiple years open? Does it cost extra? On
the other hand, can a customer cleardown / purge at frequent intervals?
At the time of purge, can we receive a CDROM or other snapshot of the whole period, for
our own archive? Or, can we contract with the webledger ASP to keep records 3 years to
meet our IRS audit requirement?
Purging accounting details within Accounts Payable, Receivable and Inventory, Fixed Assets
requires complex logic to preserve open item detail. Please send me your
yearend purge "FAQ".
15. GUARANTEED EXPUNGEMENT: Can subscribers with special needs, assure
their webledger is totally expunged including all backup copies, at any intervals? Just as
companies now expunge all email as standard practice, can your subscribers expunge
financial detail?
16. SERVICES AVAILABLE TODAY: Provide a list of external internet
services that have been successfully integrated with your webledger, with the price tag
for each service. Include your recommended solution provider for
A. Delivering invoices to subscribers' customers, either electronically or by
hardcopy printing
B. Executing an ACH or other payment
C. Billing aggregators who you can successfully receive bills from.
D. Web Storefronts successfully synchronizing with the webledger, on inventory stock
levels and credit cards receivables (ie website knows our transactions.)
17. CUSTOMIZATION: What is your solution for customization?
A. Can you customize our company's configuration at the data center?
B. If you are customizing numerous subscribers, your data center must be
bedlam. How do you keep the train from running off the rails? How many support
engineers do you have, per subscriber?
C. If I work with you, to build customized screens and workflow, whose property are
those? I don't want my competitors to use them.
D. Assuming you cannot customize, how many pre-configured "templates" do
you have? Let me see your best template, for my industry/market.
18. TRANSACTION INTEGRITY: What is your message queue, transaction
monitor or other solution, to manage uncompleted transactions over wide networks?
19. LOCAL SITE INTEGRATION: We have a local Point-of-Sale
system, and other business-process software which requires integration from our local site
to the webledger.
What is your technology for local integration? Is the webledger delivery pure HTML or does it involve DCOM, CORBA, or Java RMI? Is this a 2-phase commit technology? Does this require an RDBMS License and DBA on our site? Who is going to perform this high-tech integration? Give us a sample module with source code so our people can test drive it.
Do you support XML? We want document-level XML interfaces to our systems.
20. MULTICOMPANY ROLLUP: We have 50 branches. We want to leave their data on the webledger, and just query it down into our rollup system programattically. Can your platform do this?
Managing intercompany payables and receivables requires special functionality usually found only on enterprise systems. Do you enforce equality between numerous intercompany balances of a controlled group? Do you provide a consolidations and eliminations solution? Are your multicurrency translations GAAP compliant?
21. EXPERTISE/CERTIFICATION: Are your engineers certified on the servers, network gear, and software? We want this in the contract. Do you have policies for technical supervision of uncertified people?
22. AUDIT TRAIL: What special features do you provide, to track or log user activities? Can I view transactions by times/dates? By userID? By classes of transactions? Is there a total, comprehensive log which I can analyze with my own analytic software?
23. EDIT OF PREVIOUSLY ENTERED TRANSACTIONS: There are two fundamental schools of thought. In small business, it is widely adopted practice to allow bookkeepers to edit previously created transactions (within various controls). Do you enable any post-facto editing, or do you require a complete voiding entry and re-posting?
If you allow post-facto editing, describe your rollforward processing logic for accounts receivable, payable, inventory, and other systems in cases where layers of later transactions exist in the ledger.
24. SERVICE PROVIDERS DASHBOARD: Can the customer provide access to the CPA/service provider? If so, how granularly can that access be controlled? is it all or none?
What views of subscribers' ledgers is provided to the CPA or
service providers, from the "CPA dashboard"? Can CPA's design and run SQL
queries against all records all his clients? For example,
SELECT * FROM UNPOSTED_JOURNALS
WHERE [SUBSCRIBER].[CPA]="TFB" and
[SUBSCRIBER].[CPA_ROLE] ="REVIEW"
AND [UNPOSTED_JOURNALS].[REVIEWED] = FALSE
or
SELECT * FROM SALES_JOURNAL
WHERE [SUBSCRIBER].[CPA]="TFB" and
[SALES_JOURNAL].[NONTAXABLESALES]=TRUE
CPAs need hundreds of these kinds of queries. And other service providers such as Supply Chain providers, payroll providers, etc. will need them even more.
25. eCo FRAMEWORK: Does the webledger site implement the eCo XML Framework? We want to implement section 4.2.3 to take part in shared business processes that span multiple enterprises. http://eco.commerce.net/specs/index.cfm
26. AUTOMATED COMPANY SETUP: We are a multilevel marketing company operating as partners with our members, in ventures with short lives. We are looking for advanced partnership creation, maintenance and dissolution under our exclusive control. (Numerous industries such as movies, construction and software have projects that begin and end this way.) Do you enable multiple companies, "subsidiaries" or 'JV's to be created by users?
Todd Boyle 12/12/1999