Strategy / project management for information interfacing

Miklos_Hollender

It is NOT a technical question. Rather would like to pick your experiences about how to manage / plan such projects, what are the best ways. So basically your employer has subsidiaries abroad that use various non-Navision accounting software. In order to keep track of their business, you need to daily upload their equivalent of Item Ledger Entry, Value Entry, so you can make report like what is their inventory, inventory value, sales, margin, so the usual, typical things, you see. These info a manager needs to control a subsidiary.

I had such a project in Ukraine, they are using 1C Enterprise and it was very hard. They really did not understand what I want, I really did not understand how their software works, and so on.

For example one problem was that they had their figures in USD I converted it to EUR. But the point is, if you buy 100PCS at a given exchange rate, and you post your Cost Amount (Actual) entry in Navision, and then you also upload your Sales entry, and it has a different exchange rate and now you have a different Cost Amount (Actual) in Navision then of course when the total sum of quantity is 0, your total value will not be 0 and managers will be annoyed. So I had to realize there is this requirement, which I was not aware of, that if you upload entries and do an exchange rate conversion, then in a "batch" you have to use the same exchange rate: basically in a FIFO the sales entry must have the same exchange rate as the purchase entry it came from.

So there were many such surprises and a difficult project.

Now I will have several projects in, how to put it in a nice way, in countries that are, "less Western" than Ukraine. How don't I pull my hair out? I am looking for more strategic / project management tips.

One idea I am currently considering that instead of talking to software developers there, I should find a local business-minded, accounting-minded independent, freelancing project manager. Is this a good idea? But double the cost. But at any rate, how do I find such a person?

Another thing. Is there perhaps an international standard or specification for uploading stuff like Item Ledger Entry / Value Entry i.e. stock movement with cost value and sales price, for analysis / reporting purposes? So I could just tell those guys send me the file in ISO XYZ format?

Ultimately, my real problem is that to keep track on a small subsidiary, to be able to report on their stock or sales this way, we should not invest much money or time. How to keep this quick and easy?