'The Good Old Days'

In the 1970’s the expenses for a small business were entered onto analysis paper. A date, description and amount were entered in the first three columns and that the figure was double-entered into an analysis column on the right. Individual expenses (e.g. postage, food, sundries and stationery) could then be analysed dimply by adding the columns. An automatic check was made on the accuracy of the addition as the individual columns had to sum to the same as the amount column on the left.

Around the same time one large multinational organisation with an HQ in London might employ over 100 managers in the finance area to set, manage and control the budgets for the European area. The managers used techniques similar to the small business. They entered budget figures onto A3 analysis sheets, which were typed up as required by their secretaries. These were then used as the basis for analysing what would happen given different sales performances, different commission rates, different interest rates etc. These were well-paid, well qualified and skilled accountants who were able to work quickly and efficiently to analyse potential changes using the latest calculators and replicate them quickly with only a tiny proportion of mistakes across all columns, and down all rows.

The speed at which they worked necessitates continual retyping so the secretaries were also kept very busy. When sheets were returned they had to be proofed, but as the managers were skilled and the secretaries well trained and highly efficient for the most part there were only a few occasions when the sheets had to be retyped. A dramatic change occurred in the early half of the 1980s to this organisation when microcomputer software became widely available.

Two different office applications that could be used by the small business to improve upon the paper-based systems employed in the 1970s are microsoft word and microsoft excel. Microsoft word is just a word processor so Microsoft excel would be more useful because of its databases and spreadsheets.

An advantage of using Excel is that it will do all the calculations for you; all you would have to do is enter the data in columns and enter a formula to add them up.

The introduction of these office packages meant that secretaries etc would only be good at their job if they had IT experience / qualifications. This may have led to old fashioned / old people who did not know how to use the packages losing their jobs. We nowadays find using such packages easy as we have grown up with them but for the older generation, they are hard concepts to grasp. However different types of job opportunities were opened up as a result of the introduction. Jobs such as computer engineers, It consultants and various other positions were made available.