For, well, pretty much ever, we humans have found making lists a great way of organising our thoughts, plans and financial records.
Make a shopping list … make a Christmas gift ideas list … make a things to do list … It’s easy isn’t it? Just start at the top of the page and start writing. The length of the list represents the amount of work done as well as the extent of the listed items – a big shopping list, a lot of Christmas ideas, or loads of things to do. Everything we write is right there in front of us.
Perhaps this could be improved with …a computer?
Let’s imagine it’s 1975
Computers have keyboards only. We are about a decade before Microsoft Windows, the Apple Macintosh and ‘the mouse’. We are also a quarter of a century ahead of widespread internet use and around 40 years before ‘cloud computing’.
From the mid-1970s onward the notion of using a pen started to look distinctly old-fashioned. The new kid on the block was the computer. Computers could take information – the stuff we wrote on paper – and ‘do things’ with it. Sort it. Filter it. Compile it. Edit it. It was fascinating.
The shopping list which you wrote (in the order the groceries came to mind) could be sorted into alphabetical order with a computer. If you added some codes to each grocery, the computer could also sort them by, say, category. How about grouping the list into categories of meat, vegetables and snacks?
Programming the shopping list
- Data Entry would be typing into the screen, say, beef … a code for “meat” … press the Return key. Crisps, a code for “snacks”, hit Return. And so on. After entering each item, it disappears into the computer. We can’t easily get back to “beef” now. It’s gone.
- Which leads us to Data Output. We will need to choose a report – a list, no less! – to recall the groceries we entered.
- Data Analysis is manipulation of the list – maybe sorted in alphabetical order … or by category … or in alphabetical order within categories in alphabetical order … only meat or only veg …
So many possibilities! You could apply the same logic to that Christmas List of Things To Do List as well, but, seriously….
What a waste of time
Of course it is. In fact, it’s almost as comical as 1970s hair styles. Nowadays, we can just shout our shopping lists at Alexa or Siri but many of us still write lists on note pads, on blackboards and whiteboards. It’s just …easier.
The one thing we absolutely would not do any more is enter our list data into a computer one form at a time to marvel at how we might sort, filter or compile it. Oh … actually … we do … sometimes …
Stop laughing, it’s now the 21st century
Despite the advent of Windows and the Apple Macintosh “graphical user interfaces”, the mouse (and trackpad and touch screen), the Internet and collaborative cloud computing … all major accounts software blunders on, forcing data into a computer one form at a time, like it’s still 1975. It reminds us of these fellas from the same era:
“They-spend-hundreds-of-their-minutes-filling-in-boxes”
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA
“Their-computer-hides-the-data”
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA
“They-are-clearly-a-most-primitive-people”
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA
A better way
Dynamic Ledgers use lists for data entry – with all their intrinsic advantages – and leverage four decades of computing progress to create the most simple, efficient and transparent accounts imaginable. You’re not a lab rat. Stop filling in the same on-screen form over and over.
Be dynamic!
A footnote: some accounting software has moved on from on-screen forms to allowing your phone to somehow do it for you. There’ll be another blog about that very subject soon.