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Good old days?

webmaxdotcawebmaxdotca Member Posts: 16

Reminiscing about good old days of accounting? I hear often about good old days of everything under-the-sun; music, writing, newspapers, you name it, even the weather! Got me thinking, I never hear about the good old days of accounting, BW (before WAVE). How about you, lament the good old days? I'm pulling up a chair here. Tell me about the good-old-days, days before accounting software. I love a back-in-time story. Sincerely, Susan

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edited August 30, 2018 in Wave Discussion

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    CharlotteCharlotte Member Posts: 671 admin

    @webmaxdotca personally my memories are all of wallets - and shoeboxes - full of receipts, and this is just for my personal accounting! I don't know if I could manage these days. Listening to records nostalgically is one thing, tearing my hair out because I can't find the receipt for an expense from May of last year entirely another. 😅How did you keep your books before Wave?

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    webmaxdotcawebmaxdotca Member Posts: 16

    howl! OMG wallets! likely 10 years from now kids, 'what's a wallet?' lol. Shoe boxes - ug. Life BW (before Wave) was a dos based accounting system that was never updated, clunky and super slow but it was ok - sure beat those big blue column books! I've been in software/IT most of my life so I never really was exposed to paper ledgers and stuff and I'm thinking I was lucky! :)

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    AlexiaAlexia Member Posts: 3,314 ✭✭✭✭

    Oh my, @webmaxdotca, that brings back memories! For my very first "grown-up" job, I was an admin assistant for a contract lawyer in my hometown. He made his contract templates in Corel Wordperfect for DOS, and had a complicated system of macros to speed up the process. ("Speed up" might be a little generous)

    This makes me one of the few 20-somethings with some experience working with DOS systems. I still have nightmares about it :wink: Really makes you appreciate... well... user interfaces, really.

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    BigHornSheepBigHornSheep Member Posts: 1

    One of my first jobs was Auditor for a hotel. It was a daily task. This was all done on gigantic ledger papers. It took me 3-4 hours to write out each customer, then around 3-4 hours to fill in the numbers for each transaction. After all that, I had to get out the adding machine, and add each row. If I made a mistake on the machine, I would have to start the whole column over. IE the boss wanted the adding machine tape to be a 1:1 with what was on the paper. Each column could be several pages long. So yea, after all of that, if any column was +/- .01 or more, the hunt would begin. Did I transpose something? Hundreds of entries spanning dozens of columns and I would have to get all of the hand made receipts back out and verify each, line by line with a ruler. That could sometimes take 3 or 4 hours. Ahhh the good ol days of accounting.

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    SilverfoxSilverfox Member Posts: 4

    Thank goodness I am too old to remember 14 column ledgers and old unit record equipment for punched cards. But with the amount of information to which we have access today, technological innovation was inevitable.
    My smartphone has at least 100 times more memory and faster speed than the first system on which I worked and had its own climate controlled room to hold a 16K computer with optional features such as multiplication and division.

    An interesting FYI, the term "bug" came from the old vacuum tube days, when a fried bug got fried and concurrently shorted a vacuum tube. The term was coined by the Late Grace Hopper, the mother of Cobol.
    Thanks for letting the old guy reminisce

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