The financial reporting industry has changed drastically over the last 20 years. Not to date myself, but oh well, here goes.  I remember when I first started out at Arthur Andersen we didn’t have computers. We used columnar paper and had to continually tape more paper on the end of the spreadsheets to add more columns if the paper wasn’t long enough.  To make a change was completely manual—erasing, re-adding, and hoping that everything flowed through properly.  In 1989 we got computers to go out in the field.  They looked like huge suitcases and we newbies always had to carry them because they were so heavy. We used Lotus 123 and thought that it couldn’t get any better than that. Then a little company called Microsoft gave us Excel and Word.  Read the rest of this entry »