Can you imagine life without the internet??!
Right now that seems impossible!
Despite all the disruptions to life at the moment, we have been able to continue working, for us it has been fairly seamless, as we have migrated to cloud apps that allow us to work anywhere we have an internet connection. We’ve carefully selected apps that enable us to assist our clients, without having to set foot in their office (or coffice or carffice).
10 or 20 years ago this just wouldn’t have been possible.
It was back in 2012 that we had our first experience with xero – we had a client who’s office was about 2.5hrs away from ours. The hosted app we were using was ok, but certainly not great – software updates had to be installed by all of the users or access was denied, sometimes the updates had bugs and none of us had access for a week or more at a time. We were supporting the client, the accountant was holding monthly reporting meetings, the admin assistant was preparing invoices, the business coach was keeping an eye on the numbers and the owners liked to jump in from time to time (sometimes they even ‘helped’).
That was a step up from desktop accounting software. Receiving software update discs once a year to update tax tables (and perhaps other updates that we hardly noticed).
When you bought a new computer you had to find the disc and reinstall, sometimes it wouldn’t connect to excel, so you had to uninstall everything and start the software installations again. The backup was usally too big to email, so it had to be saved to a disc and delivered to the accountant or advisor. Changes had to be posted in both versions.
Before that it might have been excel spreadsheets (oh the formula errors!)
If you can remember further back – paper ledgers. Column books and kalamazoo. Calculators or adding machines with paper tape…….
We are super grateful to have Xero, Receiptbank, Float, GovReports, Practice Ignition, Xbert, MinuteDock, Asana, Zoom & Facebook in our lives!
The internet and our Appstack has allowed us to support our clients through these challenging times. Hurrah for the internet!
