As I sit surrounded by technology I remember a time when I worked in a bustling atmosphere with girls running around from office to office. Taking dictation, sending telex, using microfiche with the noise of manual typewriters and gestetner machines in the background – oh and plug and chord phone systems. For those of you who have never heard of gestetners, telex and microfiche I’m sure you can Google them.
In the past 3 decades technology has blossomed and now is growing at such a pace it has its own language and a dedicated dictionary.
Personally, I think technology is wonderful - almost magical at times. Small business couldn’t exist without the pc, Smartphone and tablets and now we have the cloud.
When I Google cloud I get this:
“A visible mass of condensed water vapor floating in the atmosphere, typically high above the ground.”
And from Wikipedia:
“Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet). The name comes from the use of a cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user's data, software and computation.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
Bookkeeping too has to keep up with the times and thank goodness. Imagine having to enter the same transaction several times over several rather heavy lined and ruled paper books and adding up manually – GST would have really been a nightmare and you had to have really nice handwriting.
With bookkeeping/accounting software you enter something once and it gets sent to all the correct places and essential business reports can be created with the click of a mouse. The cloud has now taken that one step further with the introduction of software like XERO and QuickBooks Hosted enabling you to access your financial information from anywhere anytime. It also allows easy sharing of your financial information with your bookkeeper(BAS Agent), Accountant and Financial Adviser so they can be up to date with your business progress.
However... the idea of technology to me is to make our lives easier and hopefully free up time for family, hobbies, interests, dreams. Hence the title Business unplugged...
It is wonderful to access your business anywhere anytime but I urge you to unplug every once and awhile and smell the roses. If you are taking a holiday take a holiday and if you feel you can’t totally unplug from your business try and keep it to a minimal. Some of you I know set computer time limits on your children maybe we need to do the same for ourselves.