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Understanding the Importance of Preserving Historical Financial Data

The hours have been billed, the client invoiced and the payment recorded, what happens next in your firm? Does your financial management software preserve a detailed financial history? For many firms, once an invoice has been collected in full, the process of utilizing the associated data stops ' a hard copy of the invoice is filed and the numbers lie dormant in the financial system. This scenario is problematic because it does not allow for long-term flexibility in accessing and manipulating the data for best practices and/or analysis purposes.

The truth is, many financial systems ' even those designed in the last few years ' don't maintain enough historic detail to solve tomorrow's problems. Why? Financial systems are transactional databases that are primarily designed to process transactions rapidly. In order to save database storage space and improve operating performance, the millions of rows of detailed data associated with billing are often discarded when an invoice is generated or paid in full, at month's end or at year's end. At that point, ad-hoc analysis is nearly impossible without custom programming or report writer specialists, unless the specific report desired was envisioned and configured in advance. How many times have you attempted to generate a report from your time and billing system only to stop because the information wasn't readily available in a usable format?

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