The State Statistical Office (SSO), together with the contractor Comtrade System Integration, on 15 November 2019, marked the completion of the 22-month-long project "Tailor-made software development and data warehouse for economic statistics” funded by the European Union. In the presence of numerous guests from the institutions–stakeholders of the statistical system, representatives of the EU delegation, statistical experts, as well as employees of the State Statistical Office, the event was opened by the Director of SSO, Apostol Simovski, who indicated that National Accounts (NA) are the most important element of macro-economic statistics. The macro-economic statistics are the result of a process of integration of data from many sources, both internal and external, and give the full picture of the economic activities in the country and offer a solid basis for EU decision-making and comparison with other countries. "The main issues that the SSO wanted to overcome by implementing the data warehouse approach were disadvantages in the current system used for data processing and calculations of ESA 2010 variables. This project strengthened the NA compilation process at the SSO in conformity with the new European System of Accounts (ESA 2010), binding methodological rules to ensure comparability of national accounts aggregates, and a compulsory data transmission programme (SDMX)" said Apostol Simovski.
The Head of the Section for Economic Issues, Institution-Building and Cross-Border Cooperation, Freek Janmaat, also gave an address stating that the EU has been helping the reforms in the area of statistics for years and made an annotation on the importance of the forthcoming Census. Nikola Radojkovikj, business analytics expert from Comtrade System Integration, made an inspirational presentation on the challenges, goals and insights while designing and implementing the Information management system for national accounts. He said that despite the first impression at the beginning of the project that it will be an easy task, it was a very hard and time-consuming process. At the end, the State Statistical Office as the beneficiary of the Project concluded the event with a presentation of the expectations, planning, realisation and the use of the developed data warehouse. The coordinator of the Sector for National Accounts, Ms. Snezana Gjeorgievska talked about the benefits from the Project for the whole system of National Accounts, and especially about the faster access to the processed data, saving time for additional data processing, avoiding duplication of certain calculations using the same or similar input variables, etc. All participants expressed their satisfaction with the project and the results with hope that there will be other possibilities for similar projects in the future.