Come on, don't be a dinosaur

It’s been a week of professional development and networking. I attended a 2-day online conference with hundreds of other accountants and bookkeepers. It wasn’t the same as a face-to-face conference with networking chats over a wine at the end of the day, but boy oh boy, it was a big move towards getting back to pre-COVID times and I think we all really needed it. It’s been 18 months of hard slog isolating in our own little silos so it was great to have a couple of days sharing war stories and to see what is coming up the innovation pipeline for our industry. But this innovation idea doesn’t seem to be embraced by all.

JOG has always been a paperless practice and we strive for more automation at every opportunity. If we can find a better, faster, more efficient way to do things, we will. We also encourage all our clients to embrace these ideals. But I often forget that this is a very foreign concept to some. Recently, I did some Saturday morning retail therapy at the fabulous West End Markets. I don’t know if you’ve ever been, but if you haven’t, you should. It’s a wonderful community event held every Saturday morning from 6am to 2pm in Davies Park right by the Brisbane River in the shade of the Fig Trees. There are more than 150 vendors selling an eclectic assortment of produce, clothing, snacks and handicrafts while roaming musicians provide ambient music. Pretty cool huh! But the thing that struck me was how many of these vendors still had no technology to run their businesses. Many still take cash and write up receipts in tiny books to hand to their clients. In 2021! It did make me wonder whether it was a fear of technology or an attempt to deceive the taxman that was holding them back from finding more efficient solutions. The jury is still out on that. But either way, I was shocked that in an era of the immediacy of data collection with the likes of cloud accounting and touch-pay, there are still many businesses out there that are completely old school. 

It took me back to when I first started in the finance industry. We had an accounting system called Kalamazoo. Basically, the sales invoices, debtor cards, cash book, and general ledger were all layered on top of one another separated by carbon paper. When you wrote on the top document, the entry was copied onto all the other documents below so you only had to write things once. That was how we eliminated double handling back in the old days. Your hand would be crippled by the end of the day from writing so much and so hard. It was clever but thank goodness for progress.

Jumping back to the present, if you are the type of small business that is currently old school and are a bit scared to jump into technology, we’d love to hear from you. We are the best hand holders in West End and are happy to lead you towards a clever bookkeeping solution that will work for you and your business.

Come on, don’t be a dinosaur!