Financial Management Template Sharing System
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Small business owners, often untrained in financial accounting, face challenges in accurately tracking their business's accounting due to the complexity of financial management, particularly with industry and location-specific chart of accounts requirements.
Innovation Solution
A method and system for generating and sharing tailored financial management application (FMA) templates, including a processor-based platform that receives company profiles from financial professionals, generates profile templates with industry and location-specific chart of accounts, and allows public or private sharing, enabling small businesses to create accurate company profiles.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of energy
If small business owners track their own accounting using financial management software, then overhead costs are reduced by eliminating the need to hire certified accountants, but accuracy and reliability of financial tracking deteriorate due to lack of accounting expertise and unfamiliarity with industry-specific requirements
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-generates industry-specific chart of accounts templates and makes them available before the small business owner needs to set up their accounting system. These templates are created in advance by experts and stored in the system, allowing users to simply select and apply them rather than creating everything from scratch.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary system (the financial management software with template library) that bridges the gap between expert-created accounting structures and non-expert users. The system acts as a mediator by providing pre-configured templates that embody expert knowledge, allowing small business owners to access professional-level accounting structures without needing expert knowledge themselves.
2Reliability
If certified accountants create custom chart of accounts for each business, then accounting accuracy and industry-specific compliance are improved, but overhead costs and time consumption increase due to the need to hire or contract professionals
Solution Approach 1:
The system creates copyable templates of industry-specific chart of accounts that can be reused across multiple businesses. Once a template is created for a particular industry (e.g., retail, manufacturing, service), it can be copied and applied to any new business in that industry, eliminating the need to recreate the same accounting structure repeatedly.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent makes the chart of accounts templates universal by designing them to serve multiple purposes and multiple businesses. A single template can be used by any business within a specific industry regardless of business size or location, making the solution universally applicable and eliminating the need for custom creation for each individual business.
3Ease of operation
If generic chart of accounts templates are provided to all businesses, then ease of operation is improved by allowing self-service setup, but adaptability to industry-specific and location-specific requirements deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies local quality by creating distinct chart of accounts templates tailored to specific industries (e.g., retail, manufacturing, service) and geographic locations (e.g., different states or countries). Each template contains accounting structures specific to the local regulations and industry practices of its target market, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments the accounting templates by industry type and geographic location, organizing them into distinct categories. This segmentation allows the system to provide highly specialized templates for each segment (e.g., a separate template for California retail businesses, another for Texas manufacturing businesses) while maintaining ease of use through simple selection interfaces.
Data Source
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
AI summary
A method for sharing templates for use with a financial management application (FMA) includes receiving, from each of multiple financial professionals, a company profile including a chart of accounts for a business operating within a commercial industry and at a geographic location, generating profile templates including, for each profile, a template including the commercial industry, the geographic location, and a redacted chart of accounts of the profile, receiving, from each of the financial professionals, a request to publicly share the template corresponding to the profile, receiving, from a small business representative, a profile creation request specifying a first commercial industry and a first geographic location, identifying a first template, and providing, in response to the profile creation request, the first template to the representative, where the representative uses the first template to create a first profile for the business.