Hiran de Silva
The setting: February 1997, Edexcel, London.
Edexcel had just been formed from the merger of two major exam bodies. The accounting system was running on an ancient VMS platform; the rest of the office was on Windows. Two cultures, two systems, no easy bridges.
Elaine in accounts did what thousands of finance clerks across the country did every day:
- She listed the cheques received into an Excel spreadsheet.
- She printed the list, carried it to the bank, and paid them in.
- Later — sometimes the next day — she re-entered the same cheques into SunAccounts, the official ledger.
The result? Duplication, delays, frustration. Credit control had to check both the accounting system and Elaine’s list to know what had been banked. Management wanted a solution.
IT’s response? Impossible.
Why? Because Excel ran on Windows and SunAccounts ran on VMS. Two different worlds. End of story. Even a SunAccounts consultant confirmed it.
The Columbo Moment
I wasn’t hired to solve this. I was there for routine reconciliations. But during a casual chat with the Head of Accounts, he asked if I knew a way out. I didn’t — but I was curious.
I had three nagging questions:
- Printing paradox – If the systems were truly “separate,” how were SunAccounts reports printing on Windows printers? Something must be moving across the boundary.
- Journal import – Surely SunAccounts could accept journals from a file? Most accounting systems did — why re-key data if you could import a CSV?
- Excel output – Could Elaine’s spreadsheet produce that CSV in the right format? Not “Save As CSV,” but properly formatted for SunAccounts.
If the answer to all three was yes, the problem wasn’t impossible at all. It was solvable.
1066 and the Machine Gun
To explain this mindset, I sometimes use my “1066 sketch.”
At the Battle of Hastings, Harold’s English troops stood on the hill, William’s Normans climbed from the beach. What if a lone soldier had a machine gun?
It didn’t happen, of course — but it could have. Gunpowder was known in China 200 years earlier. Ballistics and bearings were understood. Mechanisation existed. The pieces were all there — just not in one place, joined by one mind.
That’s what this banking problem was. The pieces were there — just waiting to be joined.
Joining the Dots
- Printing paradox solved: I found Phil Walker, the VMS guru. He’d written a small script that automatically copied print files from VMS to Windows, so they could be picked up in Word or Excel. Could it work the other way? Phil shrugged, said “of course,” and set it up in minutes.
- Journal import confirmed: The SunAccounts reference manual showed exactly how to import journals from a text file, with rules to validate accounts, dates, and user permissions.
- Excel output created: I was just learning VBA. With some tinkering, I wrote a macro to generate a perfectly formatted text file from Elaine’s spreadsheet.
The Prototype
Within days, we had it working:
- Elaine entered her cheques in Excel as before.
- With one click, Excel produced a journal file.
- That file was copied straight into VMS.
- SunAccounts imported it in seconds.
No more duplication. No more delays. Credit control saw live data.
The “impossible” problem was solved.
Why This Changed My Life
This small project did three things:
- It disproved IT and the consultants who had said “not possible.”
- It delighted management, because it showed what curiosity and lateral thinking could do.
- It brought me to their attention — and they weren’t about to let me leave at the end of my temp contract.
That was the moment my consulting career changed direction. From then on, I wasn’t just an accountant with a spreadsheet. I was someone who could see the machine gun in 1066 — someone who could join dots others didn’t even notice.
👉 In the next story: the QCA Audit, where I went deeper into VBA — and, funnily enough, discovered I was treading the same path a young Satya Nadella was about to demonstrate on the world stage.
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