A Quick Look Into the Options that you Have in this Area
Let’s turn the clock back about 30 or so years and look at an accountant’s office. There would be rows of file cabinets, lots of pencils, a dial telephone and an old calculator with a crank on the side, that was later replaced with the automatic printing kind that ran on electricity. Back then you figured everything out by hand by using decimals and figuring out the Time Value of Money calculations and totaling things out and jotting them down in a book called a ledger. IF mistakes were made it took hours or days to recalculate the error and make the corrections
Now let’s fast forward to the office of a financial planner today. There is most likely an ultra slim laptop on the desk, a can of Diet Coke and a cell phone. The data is all put in a program that prints out a sheet and you are done. If a mistake is found you update the bad entry and everything else updates its self and all is right in the world of finance, as you know it.
Now obviously things are a lot simpler today and they are infinitely easier and I wager a lot more accurate. The personal financial calculators that you can but at the local drug store or grocery store that are about the size of a small stack of credit cards can do more than the mainframe IBM computers that NASA used to launch many a space mission including the Apollo moon landings.
But you know the trick here is not that you have the technology. It is in whether you know how to use the technology or not. You see you can put the data into a financial calculator and have it print out your spreadsheets with not a problem in the world. But what happens if you don’t fully understand the information it is asking for? Then you have a batch of meaningless information that tells you a basic story. It won’t help you figure out how to improve that story or how capitalize on the strengths of that story. It just gives you the headline.
So while the tool of having one is great, if you don’t fully understand it then it is a lot like having a multi-trillion dollar space rocket in the yard. If you can get it to run but can’t figure out what it means, it’s not doing you a darned bit of good.
