In almost every business, the accounts department needs a close relationship with the IT department. But that doesn’t mean the two have much in common: many of what IT professionals consider the basic assumptions of business are totally disregarded by accounts departments.
It’s a strange situation to ponder, particularly considering that in many organisations, big or small, the entire IT function reports to the finance director. That may be a historical consequence of the fact that accounts departments were often the earliest adopters of information technology; for a thoroughly readable account of the first commercial computer to be deployed in the UK, I recommend A Computer Called Leo by Georgina Ferry, published by HarperCollins in 2010. Leo was a computer that handled payroll processing, inventory management and other jobs for Lyons Tearooms, and while it might nowadays be considered to be more on the operations side of the business than purely accounts, it was commissioned and managed by the accounts department.
But while accounting may be central to the functioning of a business, it’s not exactly the heart of the company. Accounting is about the monetary value of the products of the business, not the products themselves.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I once had a client who
