Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Did you consider an off the shelf ERP product?

I've written something similar to the first part - extract raw data out of various source DB's using SQL queries then push it to our organisation's ERP product (SAP) using A2A messaging.

From my view SAP is black box but it handles the actual accounting/ financial logic part i.e Ledgers, product tracking, inventory management etc. Our Accountants all seem pretty comfortable using it.




Airbnb's data models weren't initially designed to be financially reported on, and by the time we needed better financial reporting, it was too late to change those models. 90% of the work was about rethinking the way to think about all of this, what financial impact should be booked, and how it could be derived from the data. None of the ERP solutions fit our use case, and I think it would have been very difficult to integrate.

We still use a general ledger to book the outputs of our new financial pipeline, but I don't think we have a traditional business model (no traditional inventory management). That's more in the finance and accounting department though, and I can't speak much to that.


I don't know the volume of transactions they have, but in my past experience with SAP it was extremely hard and expensive to implement and make it scale (1~2 years for the initial implementation and migration and 10M+ USD spent), and we weren't even that big (~3M sales orders per year). Debugging it was also a nightmare, and they still had frequent data integrity issues, even just between SAP modules.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: