Decisions - Business intelligence - Data day grind.

(From Financial Director)

Byline: Anthony Harrington.

There was a time when the general ledger was king. You coded your ledger to enable groupings and totals that were of interest to your business to be assembled at some ongoing print run. Then you poured yourself a cup of coffee, thumped the printout onto the table and cogitated, flipped pages and cogitated some more. A view of your business and its health and profitability emerged - if you knew what you were doing.

As time went on, the ledger got crusted over with functionally-specific, whizzy new applications. Functions such as sales order processing, distribution and manufacturing grew into monsters in their own right which sat on top of, and fed information down to, a now thoroughly subterranean general ledger.

With so much specific information being captured, printouts became mammoth.

This created fertile ground for a new breed of application, business intelligence (BI), now a billion-dollar industry.

But Paul Yarwood, managing director of The GL Company, says it's time companies got back to the general ledger as their first port of call for business information. "Go back to basics and get everything you need from the general ledger," he urges.