Electronic accounting eases up the workload

My late grandmother used to keep her finances in neat and steady order. In her later years, when she had quite poor health conditions, I used to help her with her daily groceries and do the visit to super market for her. She always got her purse from the drawer, counted carefully the money for me, gave the shopping list and then marked on her little blue notebook the amount of money she gave to me. And when I had the shopping done, she took the receipts, and wrote down every item and the price.


In later years, when my grandma had already gone into eternity, I sometimes missed especially her advices on keeping the finances in order. As an entrepreneur you however have much more of the traffic on you accounts and the manual, written down accounting is not probably the most practical way of keeping on track on credits and debits. And when you add the whole component of taxation into the accounting, which for common office worker and employee is dealt by the employer, you are already in the jungle of different kind of payments and costs, incomes and compensations.


Even if the records are kept on the computers and with the help of computers, the manual way of recording all the transaction traffic is a mess and demands even more organized manners than my grandmother used to have. She just run her personal finances with cash money only while the poor modern-day self employed entrepreneur has a whole universe of different kind of taxes and payments to take care of. Solution for the professional running into these problems are the accounting softwares (in Finnish = kirjanpito-ohjelma) and electronic accounting. That still leaves some work for the entrepreneur herself, but is anyway simplest method to keep the track on finances.

Paperless office is an ecological choice

The idea of the paperless office has been around at least since seventies but only now it is truly possible to realize an office environment where use of paper is reduced to minimum. Think of some big, international corporation – they receive thousands of job applications, their workers write thousands and thousands vacation announcements, money orders and bills and receive salary payment checks and order products, all on paper. This will produce tons and piles of sheets. In Finland one office worker produces approximately 7000 paper sheets annually, so moving into paperless office not only is an ecological choice, but saves money as well.


Many companies have already taken into practice to not to print everything, but to do as much as possible through internet connections, electronically and with the assistance of computers. City of Helsinki for example managed to reduce the amount of paper sheets per employee into around 3000 pieces in one year after taking the programme of paperless office into action. However, most of the reduce was result of the outsourcing of the printing and this way the paper consumption was merely outsourced to outside printing office.


The conditions for realizing the paperless office are already here. Documents can be drafted, shared and edited for example in a common office space in the office network and the bills can be send as official documents through e-mail. Even the accounting and salary payment can be done nowadays without using any paper – many accounting companies offer even electronic accounting (in Finnish = kirjanpito) services in which you can send and receive electronic bills and handle them wholly with an internet connection and a computer.