In another life, I was a specialized type of accountant, for a while. I used to -- unofficially, at my own initiative -- save my pure accounting co-workers day

In another life, I was a specialized type of accountant, for a while. I used to -- unofficially, at my own initiative -- save my pure accounting co-workers days of time and effort by e.g. taking 15 minutes two write up a quick bit of Excel formulation and/or scripting. (Lest this sound dangerously hackish, I was a stickler for accuracy and often greatly decreased their error rate in the process including through describing how to better manage their task and errors.) These were the front line workers; the people who actually "do stuff". I was appreciated by management, to a point. Above that point, though, it became a matter of politics and connections. At that level, people "bought what they had connections to". Which was subsequently foisted onto those "front line" workers. I remember, for example, interfacing an SAP system radically different from its predecessor, into our own systems. No one asked my opinion; the "new way" just came "thrown over the wall". That's what you're up against. A great degree of not "what you have" but "who you know". Those coworkers of mine lucked out, in a small way, because they knew me. The corporation was happy to leave them toiling at their "digital loom piece work", until it shipped their jobs off wholesale to elsewhere, because that looked better on the quarterly bottom line. A lot of the "big" financial software I saw was similar. "The professionals" came up with "the way" (often rather bastardized, due to their own internal process) one should do things, and sold packages that purported to more or less do that. And you were stuck with that. There was great pressure to adapt your process to the purchased system, rather than vise versa. On the "front end", people had to come up with work-arounds to make that system do enough to let them manage the reality on their desks. A lot of accountants make a glorious, tragic mess of Excel. I've seen it -- over and over and over, again. But the big systems are seldom a solution, in good part because rather than looking at those people's problems, they impose a top-down methodology that nobody really wants and that makes a lot of work in and of its own nature. Feed the beast, rather than taming it.