How do you get left-brained people, who are mathematically oriented, and right-brained people, who relate better to verbal and graphic communication, to fully understand a company’s annual report?

Irwin M. Jarett, an instructor in DePaul’s School of Accountancy and Management Information Systems, has developed an innovative software tool to address this problem, and his creation recently earned him a rare software patent from The United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Jarett, founder of Tomorrow's Software L.L.C. of Rosemont, Ill, developed the software, called CPAnalyst, to help students and business people understand financial reports through a “whole brain” approach to presenting financial data.

“The software allows students and business people to understand the subtleties of financial statements and quickly grasp a company’s financial situation,” said Jarett, who is a certified public accountant. The goal is to present the company’s data as numbers, which appeal to left-brained, mathematically inclined people such as accountants and middle managers, and as words and graphics, which may be more understandable for right-brained, creative people such as entrepreneurs and personnel professionals."

CPAnalyst takes corporate financial statements and automatically presents them as numbers, words and graphics on the same computer screen, which is divided into four quadrants.

A company’s overall financial picture is presented as bar graphs on the top left portion of the screen. On the bottom left portion of the screen, the software calculates ratios, such as debt to equity, that are important for decision making, and shows the results as bar graphs. The top right portion of the screen shows the numbers in the traditional tabular format.

On the bottom right portion of the screen, the numbers are plugged into an executive summary that includes an automatic, industry-specific written analysis of the company's financial position.

Jarett, who developed the software in 1996, and DePaul Accounting Professor Belverd Needles have been using CPAnalyst in their MBA accountancy courses for three years. Needles also has included the software with the textbook, “Financial Accounting,” that he co-authored with his wife, Northwestern University accountancy professor Marian Powers.

The version of the software given to DePaul students contains data from 20 corporate annual reports, representing two companies from every major U.S. business sector. It allows students to analyze the data and add their own written interpretation of the company’s financial outlook to the executive summary section. “Students are spending less time hunting down annual reports and more time analyzing and understanding the accounting statistics,” Jarett said.

Now that he has a patent, Jarett plans to explore whether there is a market for his software among businesses. “The purpose of this software is to make people whole-brained managers. If a number-adverse executive wants to know the bottom line, he or she can look at this and easily see whether a company is doing good or bad.”