Moving on from the Stomping Ground | Where has entered gone?
Our recent Blog ‘Teaching a robot accounting’ coincided with a clean out of documents that I’ve been storing since the start of my Bookkeeping business back in 2006. The documents were what you would expect, but I had a momentary jolt of disbelief when I discovered some old rubber stamps and realised how processes have changed so dramatically from Entered.
Rubber Stamping
Physically finding my old rubber stamps was one of those moments. I snapped and shared on Facebook and the engagement was almost immediate. The photos made other people smile and want to comment too. One person asked “where is entered …where has entered gone?”
Memory is a powerful thing. “Remember that?” “I can’t believe how much it’s changed!” “Is that really how it used to be done?” When it comes to the past, nostalgic sighs and utterances of disbelief are understandable.
The past is our reference point – allowing us to measure the breakneck speed of modern change; and nowhere is that more evident than with finances and bookkeeping. So where has entered gone? It’s departure started with the arrival of cloud accounting, it’s hard to believe that all this has happened in 10 years! From literally rubber stamping to living in the cloud.
The relevance of this connection is centred around the stamps found in the storage unit and the short time frame to us launching auto assistive invoice coding.
Back in the day (2006) and for many years prior to this office workers used an array of stamps to get through the daily process call clerical work.
The Invoice paper trail went something like this
1) Issue a Purchase order (usually a manual purchase order duplicate book) stamp APPROVED
2) Fax purchase order – Stamp FAXED
3) Enter the Purchase Order into the accounting system – Stamp ENTERED
4) Goods received with packing slip – Stamp CHECKED
5) File Packing Slip in Lever Arch folder either in alphabetical order date – Stamp FILE COPY
6) Invoice received in Mail – Stamp RECEIVED (with date)
7) Enter the invoice into the accounting system – Stamp with ENTERED
8) Find and staple invoice to Purchase Order Stamp FILE COPY
9) Statement received in Mail – Stamp RECEIVED (with date)
10) Collate invoices and purchase orders and reconcile to statement – staple and file ready for payment
11) Print an Accounts Payable report from the accounting software
12) Write the Cheque (Check) Stamp NOT NEGOTIABLE and Stamp CHEQUE NUMBER
13) Enter the cheque payment details into the accounting software – stamp ENTERED
14) Bank Statement received in mail – stamp – RECEIVED with DATE, stamp – CONFIDENTIAL – stamp FILE COPY
15) Enter and reconcile the Cheque – stamp ENTERED
While looking up images for ‘entered’ it was interesting to see the ‘future dates’ on the images, when the images were made they must have picked dates way in the future with a view that the stamps would still be in use.
Staying ahead of the stamp
Do you think the stamp manufacturer considered that physical paper would no longer be required as soon as 2016 – that stamping FAXED would be redundant … to have a fax machine nowadays is an exception rather than the rule.
This reminded me of the famous Kodak Story What went wrong for Kodak. Consequently I realised that if our Partners had not embraced cloud technology they would still be back at the stamping ground rather than living in the cloud.
With Xero the invoice trail goes like this
Note this is without the auto assistive invoice coding
1) Raise Purchase Order using inventory items – EMAIL
2) Receive Goods – mark as billed
3) Receive Invoice via email – send to Xero files or use Xero to Xero network
4) Add File to bill
5) Use batch payments and auto load to bank or manually upload Batch
Bank feed auto match for exact amount
Get Paid Faster by adding a Payment Gateway
All done !
Author: Melanie Morris is head of Bookkeeping NZ
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Source: Xero Blog
