Yes, a benevolent dictator would want to make financial reporting as difficult as possible as they rob the treasury before the "aviator sunglasses" phase.
I worked in a line of business leadership role for a multi-billion dollar organization. The ledger/financial ops stuff for super high-level reporting and payments were done by old mainframe apps. Everything else was done on a series of Excel spreadsheets hosted on a fileserver somewhere. All sorts of complex stuff was done in there. Finance guys are good at finance and frankly, stuff worked.
They eventually transitioned to a modern at the time Peoplesoft system. The spreadsheet system was better in almost every way to the business units. The ERP was better for the financial ops teams. The shortfalls of the various ERP modules meant that the excel work was pushed down to the lines of business -- we probably had exponentially more spreadsheets, made by idiots who had no idea what they were doing. It also worked, but it was slower and certainly alot more expensive. The tools available for things like budgeting were primitive and ineffective - I literally used a P-Card to buy quickbooks and a built my own little finance shop.
Yep, yep. There's yer trouble. Larry found another app to stack on his DB and he knows he's got the finance guys by the balls with vendor lock-in, so it doesn't matter how crap it is.
Fortunately under my BDFL rule he's going to Devil's Island.
> before the "aviator sunglasses" phase
Before? Already there. Got the combination cap too. Been practicing the smile I'll use for the portrait mural that every large building has to have painted on the side.
