Financial and Accounting

Reliable financial forecasting requires accurate information about corporate expenditures and income. One of the earliest XML applications was the Microsoft BizTalk language, geared toward automating financial systems and business-to-business transactions. Planning the migration to online record keeping with XML should be on every CFO's to do list.

Emerging standards such as the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) and EDGAR online promise to remove the need for labor-intensive filing of paper forms with regulatory agencies. When all the relevant corporate records are available in some XML dialect, it becomes a relatively trivial problem to transform them for use by analysts, auditors, and government agencies.

Time Sheets

Many service-oriented companies need to track time spent working on projects for specific customers. Particularly in service-oriented companies, accurately tracking employee contributions to billable projects is crucial to maintain profitability. Unfortunately, most time-reporting systems are based on proprietary legacy technologies.

Web-based time and accounting systems are gaining momentum. With recent advances in server-side XML technology, creating and storing time-sheet information in XML is becoming a valuable complement to database-oriented solutions. When employees are offline, geographically disbursed, or onsite with a customer, the capability to enter and submit time-sheet information in XML via e-mail is a welcome change to the error-prone fax-based method.

▸See the Offline Order Processing Using Store-and-Forward project (Chapter 14) for an example of a system like this.

Expense Reports

Spreadsheet-based expense solutions are difficult to assimilate into an automated framework. Even with powerful scripting languages (such as Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications), developing reliable systems that integrate information from multiple documents into a single, coherent database is difficult. As more XML editing tools and forms packages become available, XML will become the format of choice for documenting and submitting incurred expenses.