Wise Accounts Blog

Doing your bookkeeping on the net? What a novel idea! What would get people to do that?

In an ever mobile society where being connected is more important than where you are, online accounting does make sense and is in fact closing a gap.

Being in touch with your records regardless of where you are can save you getting in trouble if you default on a payment because you couldn't remember the date or the amount.

If you operate a business or an association there could be a need for several persons to update receipts and expenses from different locations in a timely fashion. Setting up a virtual network and deploying some elaborate software can be time wasting and expensive. These features are a given with an internet-based application.

Internet bookkeeping does away with several levels of threats like hard disk breakdown, the theft of your laptop, computer viruses and so on. If you use the internet for internet banking the next logical step is to use the internet to access your accounting records even from an iPhone.

This concept feeds into the overall idea of cloud computing where people no longer want to maintain their own computer operations but instead shift to farms of dedicated servers with backup storage and non-stop power supplies.

Curiously for those of us old enough to have been using computers in the 1970's that is where it all started from! In those days all you had was a terminal hooked up to a mainframe. Then in the 1980s the IBM PC revolution hit. People demanded more and more flexibility in their reports and were re-manipulating their information in a Lotus 123 spreadsheet. It looks like after 40 years we have gone full circle... history has a habit of repeating itself.

Aside from what the pundits are trying to tell us the marketing emphasis is this: "just like instant coffee and microwave ovens - It's all about convenience." If you use the net to check the news, download music, read your email, send your resume and whatever else, the next logical steps is to use it to keep your financial records also.

What about privacy? Many services use your email address as identification. They send you your password to that address to make sure it is not a dummy token but indeed can reach you. Apart from that one point of contact they know absolutely nothing about you - neither do they want to. You can change your email address at will.

Add Comment