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 Auditor’s ally: Over the past two decades, Harald Will has quietly built the low-profile ACL Services into one of B.C.’s genuine technology sector success stories
By Curt Cherewayko The invention of one of the most widely used data extraction and analysis computer languages dates back to 1972 and a computer science and business professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Hartmut Will saw the challenge and opportunity in the fact that, back then, businesspeople had neither the skills nor the tools to understand and analyze business information that was increasingly being kept in computers. While extracting and translating relevant business data back then required a programmer, Will believed business folk should be able to retrieve the information for themselves – without risking losing the meaning in translation. As well, computing in its early days was supported by batch programming, which meant that lumps of data were extracted for multiple questions at a time – batch answers to batch questions – with no interactivity. Good businesspeople typically don’t know their second question until they’ve answered their first. So between 1972 and the early ’80s, Will, with a little help from his savvier students, developed audit command language (ACL). The language had far-reaching potential, but for Will it was more of an academic pursuit, so ACL generated only mild commercial interest from other academics and scientists. It took the entrepreneurial flare of his son to deliver ACL to the business masses. Before 1987, Harald Will had largely been self-employed, primarily as a computer programmer or consultant. He dropped out of UBC after three months, but completed a two-year business program at Langara College that combined the philosophies, religions and business practices of Pacific Rim countries. He helped build early prototypes of the restaurant point-of-sale (POS) system now sold by Burnaby’s Squirrel Systems and tinkered with other programming for communicating data from front-of-restaurant POS systems to the back office and kitchen. Will realized ACL’s potential when he noticed that digital accounting information in a restaurant’s POS terminal would be spit out at the end of the day on a paper roll and thrown into a box with rolls from previous days. “If that information existed in digital form in that point-of-sale terminal, why can’t I just suck it out of that terminal, have it in front of me on a computer and work with it?” recalled Will. He approached his father about shaping a business out of ACL, and together they founded ACL Services Ltd. in Vancouver. “[Audit command language] had this uncanny ability,” said Will. “You pointed it at any digitally stored information anywhere, and it would allow you to easily interact with it.” He was essentially the company’s only employee for a time, working out of single office. Today, the company has 14,000 customers in 150 countries. Auditors and compliance officers in 95 of the Fortune 100 companies use the company’s software and services to monitor and manage every detail of their employers’ accounts. ACL is profitable. It has roughly 200 employees and regional offices in Toronto, London and Singapore, but as a private company it doesn’t provide revenue figures. Will said the company has never sought external capital because it has never needed to. Its revenue in 2003 – the last year it disclosed financials – was about $27 million, and the company has experienced year-over-year growth in each of its 23 years. Accounting scandals involving Enron and WorldCom heightened ACL’s profile. In reaction to such scandals, governments enacted stronger audit accountability and responsibility laws. In the U.S, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Government Accountability Office approached ACL for guidance while shaping the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. “New legislation served more to shine a spotlight on what’s important, and we show up in that spotlight, rather than see any dramatic revenue growth,” said Will. When Siemens AG found itself in the middle of a bribery scandal in 2008, it turned to ACL to develop customized software so the company that could continuously monitor its transactions against its purchasing policy. When a national airline in the U.S. found that its employees were using their sick days during the same days that they used their employee air miles, ACL developed a monitoring system that could crack down on the offenders. “As people increasingly talk about good governance or risk management or compliance, we maintain the belief that at the core of all of that is audit,” said Will, who is also strong believer in building B.C.’s technology sector. He’s worked with Science World to ensure children develop an interest in technology early on. At the other end of the spectrum, he’s a director of ACETECH, which connects CEOs and past-CEOs of technology and life-sciences companies in B.C. “The technology industry means good jobs, well-paying jobs and transferable job skills,” he said. Will is also a director of the board of Subserveo, a Vancouver company that develops automated compliance software for brokerages. Michael Hagerman, an executive vice-president at Subserveo, first met Will through ACETECH about seven years ago. He called Will detail-oriented, understated and tireless. “We’d go out and have a dinner meeting and he’d go back to the office for a couple hours,” said Hagerman. Hagerman said that it is Will’s business knowledge, not his accounting expertise, that has led to ACL’s success. “It was because he knew how to build, maintain, run and expand a team.” Will acknowledges that business scandals are not likely to end, despite the introduction of stronger regulations and better monitoring and auditing software. “People are creative,” said Will. “You have large companies, senior executives and greed. The challenge is to keep up with it and stay on top of it, but it’s not easy by any means.” •
Mission: Continue to expand ACL Services and support auditors as they play an increasingly prominent role in the fiscal health of businesses Assets: Experience in founding and guiding a technology company whose staff has grown from one to 200 with no external capital Yield: A profitable technology company whose profile is raised every time a major accounting scandal damages the economy
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This article from Business in Vancouver May 11-17, 2010;
issue 1072 Photograph: Dominic Schaefer |
