Accounting is a fundamental slogan of every business. Without the accounting practice, it is difficult to be effective in your business. Its basically helps you to monitor the transactions happening and make sure that all the expenditures are meaningful. Accounting helps you to reduce the unnecessary expenses and increase the profit scale of the business. All the companies implementing the same strategy of recording the transactions to achieve the maximized profit with the minimized expenditure. Accounting can be done either manually or using the accounting software. We are going to discuss about the advantages and disadvantages of the manual accounting and the computerized accounting in this article.
Generally accounting cycle has certain steps of activities. Recording all the transactions as “Journal”. Posting them into ledger accounts. Preparing trial balance, making adjustment entries, preparing adjusted trial balance, preparing financial statements and proper disclosures, posting the closing entries and preparing the balance sheet. This is all about accounting. It is not a big deal to carry out this sequential process, but its become dramatically hectic when there are thousands of transactions.
Let us focus on the main issues of manual accounting here. Paper works are involved in manual accounting. All the accounting activities would be carried out on the paper manually. Obviously, it would take much time and resources for the large organization. Computerized accounting saves lot of time where in, the employee has to record the transactions and all the other calculations would be carried out by the software either automatically or by a request. Computerized accounting provides accurate results on the precised report but some software takes much time and resources as manual accounting requires. Hence, it is not easy to decide on which software would work more fast and economic. Best computerized accounting software is highly expensive. On the other hand, computerized accounting could handle thousand calculations simultaneously where as manual accounting needs much time to do that. Even then, we cannot say that manual accounting provides no benefits. Manual accounting can be handled with cheap work force and resources. It is reliable as it is done manually with minutes of observations. Do not have to rely on the machines.
The main advantage of computerized accounting is the speed and accuracy. We can have an easy backup and restoration system. All the data and information will be secured. The disadvantages includes high cost, updating the system, special training for the personnel, relying only on the machines and the reduced employment.
Both the computerized and the manual accounting got the merits and the demerits. They can be differentiated only in terms of cost, speed and the mobility. It can be implemented according to the size of the business. Small and Medium sized companies prefer manual accounting considering the low cost. They could utilize quality accountants and carry out the day to day activity or even they could simply offshore their accounting tasks to an outsourcing firm. Large scale businesses completely rely on the computerized accounting as it gives fast and accurate results. It would be really helpful for them to have the accounting records without any chaos.