It doesn’t matter whether you have crossed check a book or not and it doesn’t matter whether you have read a news about the changed made by the IRS, the one thing is for sure that you must have heard about accounting. You should know that accounting is one of those underrated or we can say overlooked departments of any business that allows the business owner to keep tabs on the financial health of the company and if a business owner will not be aware about the financial health of the company then there is no way it can survive.
There are many businesses out there that are still not focusing on their accounting practices and by doing so, they are just sending an invitation to the downfall of their business. It doesn’t matter how good is your marketing strategy and how good your products or services are, if you will not pay attention to your accounting practices then you will not be able to survive in any industry for more than a year. There are many aspects of accounting that you will have to take care of but in this blog post, we are going talk about the technological aspect of accounting.
If someone would have said both the words technology and accounting a few decades ago then you would have not been able to relate both these terms but this perspective has changed a lot during the last couple of decades. Now, technology has become one of the most important parts of any type of accounting operation and in the future, we will only see the rise of technological solutions in the accounting industry. So, through this blog post, we will look at the three different stages of technological transformation in accounting.
The Software ERA
This might not be one of the first eras of accounting but it is surely the first era of technological accounting. Before the arrival of this era, the only way people used to deal with their books was through pen and paper. This was one of the main reasons why accounting was considered as one of the most boring jobs that included geeky nerds dealing with huge piles of paper, pen, and calculator. It didn’t matter how big your firm is or how complicated your accounting needs were, you had no other choice than carrying out everything on pen and paper.
Well, this was surely a very slow and complicated process of accounting and therefore, it required a big change that came in the form of accounting software. With the advent of software in most of the industries, how can the accounting industry be left behind?
ERP accounting software solutions brought the biggest change in the accounting industry and made people more accurate, effective, and productive with their books. Now, there was no need to do the manual calculation and the need for pen and paper in the accounting industry was completely wiped out. But this was not it as we moved to another technological era.
The Cloud ERA
People were very much happy with what they got because the move from pen and paper to accounting software solution was one of the biggest changes that accounting people witnessed. But after a couple of decades of accounting software domination in the accounting industries, people found out that even this practice is slow. Every time, anyone needed to access their books has to return back to his office desktop on which the accounting software solution was installed. This type of limited accessibility was making the life of accountants less productive.
There were many limitations people were facing while using the desktop installed accounting software and that’s why the move to the cloud accounting solution in the accounting industry was welcomed with open arms. Cloud accounting solutions like QuickBooks enterprise hosting brought on of the best solutions for dealing with accounting and everybody soon realized that cloud accounting solutions like QV host are here to stay for a very long period of time. With the help of cloud accounting solutions, people got anywhere, anytime access, bank-level security, high uptime, scalability, better collaboration, and much more.
The AI
When people started thinking that cloud accounting is going to be the last technological improvement in the world of technology, people saw another leap of faith but this replacement was not a replacement to the already existing cloud accounting technology, rather it was an addition to it.
While using cloud accounting technology, most of the people realized that the manual task required to do bookkeeping was eating away their time and since there are many tasks in accounting that are repetitive, people were looking for ways to automate this process.
With the arrival and growth of AI, it became clear that AI will be incorporated to make accounting easier and the same happened. Now AI is being used in accounting software solutions to wipe out the manual workload in accounting and till now AI has done very good in terms of automating the repetitive tasks in accounting.
Well, as you can see, there are many changes brought in by technology in the accounting sector and all these changes have happened for good. In the future, we will witness that there will many new introductions to the world of accounting, and technology will keep shaping the accounting practices to make them more quick, effective, automated, and useful.
Author Bio Saurabh Gupta is currently working as a senior content writer at MyQBHost, a QuickBooks cloud hosting provider and the two things which matters the most to him is technology and writing. Cloud computing, Artificial intelligence and cybersecurity is what he loves the most.