I can still remember my first job in an accountant’s office. I made tea for everyone, I analysed bank statements, did bank reconciliations, analysed purchase and sales invoices and got sent for a long stand that could be found in the storage cupboard. This was all hand written stuff and helped by the trusty calculator. It was an excellent way of gaining experience and an understanding of how accounts and bookkeeping actually worked. It also built into you processes and taught you the importance concentration has no matter how dull the job seemed to be.
Today it seems like a whole different ball game. Technological advances in computing power coupled together with the birth of fibre broad band, for most businesses, has led to an explosion of internet based applications and cloud solutions, to help streamline businesses and the finance function.
So have we seen the end to the traditional training ground that has created many a great bookkeeper and accountant? Today you can get great cloud applications like Receipt Bank and Datamolino which just requires you to send Pdf copies of your invoices to them and the OCR software reads all the information for you and can spit it back out in a .CSV format or even link directly into your accounting software. One more cup of tea please office junior.
Then you have banks, where nearly everyone has access to internet banking. Again you can get downloads of this data as well, which can be imported into your software directly through a bank feed or via .Csv file. Another cup of tea please, office junior. Bank recs are almost automated due to this last point. Another cup of tea please.
So where does this leave our trusted office junior who requires holidays, generally has their head in the clouds, can’t get things right because they lost concentration due to a fly buzzing around the office. Tea anyone?
I seem to be a little harsh on the office junior but to be fair the young people of today have grown up with the technological advances and a fair few will be creating it tomorrow. They just need educating in how to do things but just a different way to the way I was educated. The principles have not changed but the format has. All that will happen is that the office junior will become more productive than I was way back in the stone age. Now where did I say that long stand was?
If you want to chat about any of the software mentioned I’m more than happy to talk you through them.
- Tip 1 Go look up Receipt Bank
- Tip 2 Go look up Datamlino
- Tip 3 If you don’t have internet banking look up OCRex
- Tip 3 Apprentices do not cost that much go and look it up
