In the realities of the Russian state, doubtless the most rule-of-law state in the world, with its own sovereign standards for bookkeeping, the Accounting Department is a service unit whose major job is minimizing tax damage while maintaining the very minimum level of risk from law enforcers, whose advent was vividly depicted as early as the Scriptures, where there is also a figurative mention of their numbers ("Illis nomen Legio", i.e. "Their name is Legion").
Thus, the Accounting department is a generator of reports for fiscal agencies based on the company’s "white" activity. It is a department that is out there to serve the needs and objectives of the business — and by no means the other way round, as Chief Accountants are prone to believe.
The principle of unilateral crossflow of data has been at the core of implementing the mechanisms of exporting the company’s activity into 1C, so beloved among all Russian female bookkeepers.
Information can only be exported into 1C — there’s no reverse flow of information from the accounting system back into the dia$par. This simplifies significantly the automation of financial and tax accounting and also insures you against the possibility of human error.
So what do we get? We end up with a much smaller need for internal accounting staff.
The sales volume at Ultra Electronics used to reach $1 billion per year. The company was specializing in retail, but was also active on a corporate level and worked with small and medium-sized wholesalers, all this
business conducted within several cities. The holding had quite a complex structure that involved the input of multiple legal entities. In other words, there was a wide and diverse field for the activity of the Accounting
Department, a unit that is normally self-propagating and may number as many as a hundred staff members or even more.
At Ultra Electronics, things were managed by just 4 (four) accountants.
Even during peak demand periods (e.g., the New Year’s Eve or other sales stimulating events), there was never a need to beef up manpower. The staff coped, and so did the software.
Someone, of course, had to sweat it out a bit trying to get those year-end reports in on time. The humans did.
Well, it is in the afore-mentioned Scriptures, which talk of the sweat of your brow and earning your daily bread.