Perils of Going Paperless
I am a big fan of a paperless office. As I have written in this blog before, Pay Per Visit Email is pretty much a paperless company and I highly recommend it. Some of the advantages include:
We use Quickbooks and back everything up on an external hard drive which is then backed up to the cloud every night and all of our banking is done online. In 18 months, there had never been a problem, until now. My mistake was not thinking far enough ahead. I had opened a new primary checking account at Chase and closed our Bank of America checking account (for a number of reasons that are not important here). What I did not realize is that our accountant had not entered the bank information into Quickbooks for the previous two months. When I closed the account, online access was terminated immediately and we had no paper copies of two months of transactions. In hindsight, I should have downloaded all of the checking account information before closing the account and losing online access.
Well, fortunately, it turned out to be not so bad. I emailed Bank of America to explain the problem and they said they would send copies of all of the statements for the whole year at no cost. It delayed closing out Quickbooks for the year by a couple weeks but, other than that, we escaped without any significant impact to operations.
It just goes to show that entrepreneurs need to constantly think about the potential impact any of our actions may have, especially when pioneering new concepts.
David Chitester
- Cost Effective - Little to no cost for copiers, file cabilnets, folders, paper, etc.
- Efficient - No lost time rummaging through file cabilnets trying to find where you or someone else filed something.
- Environmentally Friendly - Saves environmental resources such as trees, chemicals, energy, etc.
We use Quickbooks and back everything up on an external hard drive which is then backed up to the cloud every night and all of our banking is done online. In 18 months, there had never been a problem, until now. My mistake was not thinking far enough ahead. I had opened a new primary checking account at Chase and closed our Bank of America checking account (for a number of reasons that are not important here). What I did not realize is that our accountant had not entered the bank information into Quickbooks for the previous two months. When I closed the account, online access was terminated immediately and we had no paper copies of two months of transactions. In hindsight, I should have downloaded all of the checking account information before closing the account and losing online access.
Well, fortunately, it turned out to be not so bad. I emailed Bank of America to explain the problem and they said they would send copies of all of the statements for the whole year at no cost. It delayed closing out Quickbooks for the year by a couple weeks but, other than that, we escaped without any significant impact to operations.
It just goes to show that entrepreneurs need to constantly think about the potential impact any of our actions may have, especially when pioneering new concepts.
David Chitester
Posted by David Chitester at 1/26/2012 4:33 PM 
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: david chitester paperless office pay per visit email entrepreneurs
Categories: uncategorized
Tags: david chitester paperless office pay per visit email entrepreneurs
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